DISPLAY OF

POWER
HOW FUBU CHANGED A WORLD OF
FASHION, BRANDING AND LIFESTYLE

By DAYMOND JOHN
with DANIEL PAISNER
To contact the author, please check out the following:

www.myspace.com/Daymond John
www.stealthbrandingcorp.com
www.mogulsonly.com
www.displayofpower.com

Copyright 2007 by Daymond John

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photo-
copy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or
articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by NAKED INK, a division of the General Trade

Book Group of Thomas Nelson Publishers, Inc. Please visit us at www.nakedink.net.

L i b r a ry of Congre s s Cat al o g in g - in-P u bl i c at i o n d a ta on f i l e w i t h

t h e L i b r a ry o f C o n g r ess.

ISBN 10: 1-59555-853-5

ISBN 13: 978-1-59555-853-4

Printed in the United States of America

07 08 09 10 5 4 3 2 1
Have you lost your mind? I mean, how is it that
you can disrespect a mans ethnicity when you
know weve influenced nearly every facet of white
America? From our music to our style of dress,
not to mention your basic imitation of our sense of
cool. Walk, talk, dress, mannerisms . . . we enrich
your very existence, all the while contributing to
the gross national product through our achieve-
ments in corporate America. Its these conceits
that comfort me when I am faced with the ignorant,
cowardly, bitter and bigoted, who have no talent, no
guts. People like you who desecrate things they
dont understand, when the truth is, you should
say, Thank you, man! and go on about your way.
But apparently you are incapable of doing that! And
dont tell me to be cool. I am cool.

Cedric the Entertainer as Sin LaSalle

in Be Cool
 Dedication

THEY SAY THAT BEHIND EVERY STRONG MAN IS A STRONG WOMAN. WELL,
I HAVE FOUR BEHIND ME, AND THATS POWER! AND SO I DEDICATE THIS
BOOK TO THE FOUR POWERFUL WOMEN IN MY LIFEBECAUSE TOGETHER,
WERE UNSTOPPABLE!

>> MARGOT JOHN . . . MY MOTHER . . . FOR GIVING ME LIFE, COURAGE,

HONOR, DISCIPLINE, AND FOR PUTTING HER DREAMS ON HOLD FOR ME
TO HAVE A FIGHTING CHANCE. FOR BEING BOTH MY MOTHER AND
FATHER, AND LEADING ME DOWN THE RIGHT PATH, EVEN IF THAT MEANT
LETTING ME GO DOWN THE WRONG PATH TO FIGURE IT OUT FOR MYSELF.

>> MARIA . . . MY EX-WIFE . . . FOR BEING THERE FOR ME FROM THE

BEGINNING, AND FOR SHOWING ME WHAT TRUE LOVE IS AND TRYING TO
SET ME STRAIGHT WHEN I WAS OUT OF CONTROL. FOR DISAGREEING
WITH ME WHEN I HAD TOO MANY YES MEN AROUND. FOR RAISING OUR
KIDS WITH A DEDICATION AND FOCUS THAT CAN RARELY BE FOUND IN THE
PARENTS OF TODAY. THE ONLY REASON I CAN STAY FOCUSED ON MY
WORK IS BECAUSE I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE IN
MY WORLD IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.

>> DESTINY AND YASMEEN . . . MY DAUGHTERS . . . FOR INSPIRING ME

EVERY DAY. FOR BEING THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN MY LIFE WHO DONT
NEED TO THANK ME FOR ANYTHING, BUT WHO DO ANYWAY. YOU ARE
SENT FROM GOD. I TRULY BELIEVE THAT. YOU ARE HUMBLE, TALENTED
AND BEAUTIFUL, INSIDE AND OUT. DADDY LOVES YOU.
 contents

Introduction
DOWN | ix

HOME | 1
Mother Knows Best . . . Drive (Literally) . . . Who Moved My
Government Cheese? . . . Re-Mix . . . Gonna Party Like Its 1999 . . .
Never Hurts to Ask

RISE | 38
A Blanket of History . . . The Geography of Cool . . . One Less
Shrimp . . . The Truth About Kicks . . . The Ripping Point . . . Same
Story, Different Decade

SHOW | 67
True Colors . . . American Brandstand . . . Get the Bags, Norton . . .
What the MAGIC Show Would Become . . . Display of Power

SMOKE | 90
New Money . . . Look the Part . . . 05 . . . Negotiation from
Ignorance . . . Young, Gifted and Black-Owned

vii
contents

FIRE | 116
Dress for Success . . . Storefront and Center . . . My Bodyguard . . .
Over-balling . . . Why the Yankees Always Win . . . Go Directly to
Jail . . . I Fired Oprah . . . Windows on the World . . . The Heat
Cycle . . . Do Your Homework . . . They Work Hard for Your Money

SHIFT | 167
Black on Black . . . Smells Like Hip-Hop . . . The Nigga This Year . . .
Hey, Hey, Hey . . . Hands On . . . Change it Up . . . The X Factor . . .
Whos In Your Ear?

Outro
CLOUT | 213

Acknowledgments
HELP | 218

viii
 Introduction

DOWN

It was 1997. Id just started making some

money. I was driving a brand new Lexus GS400. Gold. My girlfriend
was renting a house in Rockville Centrea mostly rich, mostly white
neighborhood on Long Island. I was feeling pretty good. I stopped for
gas on Sunrise Highway, on my way home from the city. It was late,
but not too late. There were other people at the gas station, but not
too many. I didnt recognize anyone in particular, but someone must
have recognized me.
I got back to my girlfriends house and took the dog out for a walk.
A little Chow Chow puppy named Coco. My girlfriend came outside,
too, and we were in front of the house just a couple minutes when
we noticed a black guy coming down the street, looking a little out of
place. He looked a little shady. Grimy. Shifty. Hair all undone. Like he
was up to something.
Now, who was I to talk, right? Me, a black man in a white
neighborhood, not exactly the George Jefferson type, walking a little
puppy, middle of the night. Who can say, maybe I looked a little shady

ix
DISPLAY OF POWER

too. But I knew my business, and Id never seen this other guy
before. He passed by once and turned the corner. I thought, This is
not good.
My girlfriend didnt like the looks of this guy either, so she hopped
in the car to follow him, see what he was up to. I couldnt call the
cops, just because someone looked out of place. It had happened to
me too many times. Maybe I had no bus fare, so I had to walk, some-
times through a nice neighborhood. Maybe my car broke down, and
there was no public transportation. Things happen. I didnt want to
jump to conclusions and convict this guy for no good reason.
Well, he must have doubled back and hopped the fence around
the house, because the next thing I knew he was walking up to me
from behind, asking, Hey, you got the time? Right then, I knew
what was coming. Right then, I thought I was dead. It took a couple
weeks for me to put two and two together and figure that someone
I knew must have seen me at that gas station on Sunrise Highway,
someone from my old neighborhood, someone who knew I was
finally making money, and that my ride was probably insured, and
they could jack the car and it wouldnt cost me a thing. All of this hit
me a little later on, but soon as I heard those wordsHey, you got
the time?all I could think was, This guys gonna kill me. Last time
I heard that line I was with my father in Central Park, fishing. I was
about eight. Someone sidled up to us and asked my father for the
time, and my father started beating the crap out of him. Just like that.
Id thought my father had gone completely crazy, beating down this
guy like that. He had a short fuse, my father, but this was over the
top, even for him. It wasnt until years later that I realized what had
happened. Only other time in my life Id ever been jumped, or
robbed, and this black guy in Rockville Centre uses the same line.
Hey, you got the time?
This guy pulled out the biggest gun Id ever seen, and led me to
the backyard. Put the gun to my head, told me to lay face down on

x
 down

the ground. I had a nice gold chain around my neck, and he pulled it
off. He told me to empty everything from my pockets. In those days,
I carried a wallet with all my credit cards and papers all rolled up and
held together with a rubber band, but there was also about $1000 in
there. The guy didnt even see the money. He took the loose change
in my pocket, and the keys to the car.
I lay there, face down, and realized Id heard a million of these
stories. Some of my boys, theyd been on the dishing-out end of the
same scene, and theyd told these stories into the ground. Id never
been on the receiving end, but I knew how it would go. I heard this
cat cock his gun. I said, Its all good, its all good. You got what you
wanted. Im not calling the cops. Why dont you just take my shoes,
so I cant run after you?
That was the code on the streets, when you wanted to keep
someone from chasing after you, youd take their kicks. It was as
good as tying them to a pole.
But he didnt take my shoes. He just drove his knee into my back,
pressed the gun against the base of my skull and my face into the
cool grass, and in that long moment while I was waiting for what
would happen next to actually get around to happening, I could see
my life flash before my eyes. Wasnt the only thing I thought about.
I also thought about my girflfriend, and hoped like hell she wouldnt
come back until this punk had left the scene. (She didnt, thank God.)
But mostly I thought about my life. Sounds like a clich, I know, but
its the Gods honest truth. I closed my eyes and saw it all, and I
thought, Man, how did I get here?

xi
 HOME

I grew up in Hollis, Queens, in a single-family

house on Farmers Boulevard. LL Cool J was from Hollis, a couple
years ahead of me, and on one of his early raps he talked about
Farmers Boulevard. That was like hard cash, to be able to say you
lived on the same street LL talked about in one of his songs, and to
be able to back it up. Christmas in Hollis, by Run DMC. Another
great song that really put us on the mapon the map, in the air, all
around.
More than anything else, it was my neighborhood that defined
me. I guess thats true for a lot of people, but in my case it was a
neighborhood that was crackling with heat and haste and energy.
Things were popping in Hollis. That was where I first got my world
view, where I developed the will to succeed, where I formed my first
ideas about people, where I first got excited about something beyond
cars, cash and clothes. Hell, its where I learned right from wrong
even if it took me a couple slips to tell the two apart. I didnt need to
hear it in a song for it to be a part of me, and I didnt need some

1
DISPLAY OF POWER

advertising copy writer to sell it to me, either. Like I said, it was in the
air, and it would form the basis for everything that came next.
I was actually born in Brooklyn, but we moved to Queens back
before I can remember, and for a while I ran against the numbers in
my neighborhood because I had both parents living with me under
the same roof. The single-parent model wasnt so common when I
was in grade school, but as I grew up youd see it more and more. It
changed as I got olderand not for the better. Most times, it was just
the mom, raising the kids. Sometimes, it was the dad. A lot of times
it was a grandparent, or an older relative. After that, it was an intact
nuclear family, so we were kind of the exception on our street, by the
time I hit my teens. We owned our own house. We were the
American ideal that didnt really reflect what was going on.
My mother, Margot John, is African-American. My father, Garfield
John, was from Trinidad. He came to this country on his own when he
was a teenager. That tells you something about him, I guess. My
father was motivated and adventurous and not afraid to go out and
stake his claim. You could say the same things about me. I got my
start in business because I stuck my neck out, and so did my father
when he was a young man. Were completely different people, but in
this way we were cut the same. He ended up renting a room in my
mothers parents home. Thats how they met, and by the time I was
born he was a computer programmer. That was his main thing. All
those little manila computer cards they used to have, back in the
1970s, back when computers were these giant, slow-moving
machines, they used to be strewn all over the place when I was a little
kid. All these dots and codes, like it was some secret language only
my father could understand.
By the time I was nine or ten, though, the numbers kind of caught
up to us, because my father moved out of the house and my mother
filed for divorce. I went from aberration to statisticor, at least, I
stepped into line with the statistics. I became like everyone else in

2
 home

my neighborhood. At some point I looked up and realized that every-

thing about my father was just dots and codes. He was feeding me
a bunch of crap, and feeding my mother a bunch of crap. One lie after
another. One excuse after another. It got to where I told him I never
wanted to see him again, never wanted to speak to him, and thats
how we left it. At about twelve years old, I was done with him. I was
done, and he was gone, and youll notice that I write about him here
in the past tense. Hes dead to me, gone, and Im clear on that. Far
as I know, hes alive and well and messing with someone elses
head, but hes out of mine.
Yeah, I was only twelve, but I was old enough to realize he was
lying to me and my mother, and old enough to stand up to it. I refused
to be his puppet. I told him on the phone one day to never, ever call
me again, and he knew I was serious. That was the last time we
spoke. Even at twelve, I was a decisive, hard-headed person, enough
to write off one-half of my support system, to cut myself off from my
entire extended family on my fathers side. He told them all to never
speak to me again. Twenty people I was close toaunts, uncles,
cousins, grandparentsgone with that one move. And Im still that
way, although Ill admit there have been times when that decisiveness
has cost me, as I will make clear over these pages. Ill even admit that
it might have cost me my relationship with my father and his family,
because he was into some things I might have understood a little bit
better from an adult perspective. The kind of things that if they came
up now, knowing what I know, I might cut him some slack. Thats one
of the great lessons I took from my father into my own role as a parent:
Dont lie to your kids, because theyll grow up and figure you out.
It wasnt a whole lot different, him being around or him not being
around. Life was pretty much the same, either way. My father was a
typical West Indian dad, which basically meant he wasnt there a
whole lot. He was always working. Maybe we went fishing on one of
his rare days off, usually out at Oak Beach, on Long Island, but we

3
DISPLAY OF POWER

didnt speak all that much. I was an only child, so its not like there
were any other kids competing for his attention, but the only time he
really talked to me was to discipline me, or correct my homework.
That was the extent of our relationship. And usually, the way he dis-
ciplined me, hed get out the belt. Thats the way he grew up, back
in Trinidad. The older I got, the more I started to get into this or that,
the more hed threaten me, and then my mother would get in
between us and hed just go off and smoke a cigarette. He wasnt
abusive, wasnt doing anything different than any of the other fathers
in my neighborhood, but thats how it was. In Trinidad, in Hollis,
Queens . . . it was basically the same.
He was a short man, my father, about five foot six, and I figured
out later he must have had a Napoleonic complex. I read up on it and it
made sense. He looked like this singer SuperCat, only shorter. To this
day, I cant listen to SuperCat or look at one of his videos without think-
ing of my father. He was always mad about something. He had that
short temper, left me thinking about that time in Central Park, when he
jumped that guy who was about to rob us, when I thought he was
completely crazy. He would even go into a store with a big old No
Smoking sign pasted up on the wall, and blow smoke in the security
guards face, like he was challenging him to do something about it. He
could be real arrogant. That was one of his things, and it would always
make me cringe. He was a chronic smoker, so I never smoked. Every
time someone would light up it reminded me of him, so I turned away
from it. It was the flip side of how I followed my mother, and not my
father, how he became a positive influence in the negative. I did just the
opposite of whatever he was doing and figured Id come out okay.
Dont get me wrong, Im very proud of my Trinidian heritage. Its
who I am. That whole West Indian thing, it was a big part of my life
when I was a kid, a big part of our family dynamic. It wasnt just the
discipline at home, or the cool, distant father stuff. It was the whole
male-female relationship, a unique way of looking at the world. With

4
 home

the men, it was all about work, work, work, and when the sun set
and the work was finally done, theyd run off and drink or play cards
or watch television. The women, theyd prepare the food, and set it
all out, and then theyd go back into the kitchen while the men ate. It
wasnt a subservient thing, or a second-class citizen thing. Thats just
how it was, on my visits to Trinidad, or when wed spend time with
friends and relatives, and I could never understand it. It just seemed
so off. Even the educated, career-oriented women in my fathers
family fell into the same mode. I didnt get why they werent sitting
down with the men. Theyd start cooking dinner at noon, and work at
it all day, and then the men would come home and theyd still be run-
ning back and forth, taking care of this and that. I used to always say
to my grandmother and my aunts, Why dont you sit down with
us? But theyd always have some reason why they couldnt, some-
thing they had to do before they sat down to eat. It wasnt like they
were banned from the table, but they made sure everything was
taken care of. And then, towards the end of the meal, theyd sit down
and help themselves to some food, usually while the men were fin-
ishing up to go someplace else to chill.
I used to think maybe they felt out of place, my aunts and my
female cousins. Or maybe it was just how they were cut, what they
were used to. It wasnt until I was older that I realized they liked it
this way. It was what they knew, how they were. I looked closer and
saw there was real joy in the work, in preparing food for their fami-
lies, in taking care of their men, and they seemed to relish in it
together. It was simple and puresomething closer to the Italian
model than, say, to the Japanese. A real island thing.
My mother never bought into that. She would fall into the same
pattern when we were with my fathers family, but when it was just
the three of us, at home, she had a whole different attitude. She was
a really, really strong woman. Still is. Hands down, she was the most
important person in my life while I was growing up, the dominant

5
DISPLAY OF POWER

influence, and its a good thing, too. She was willful, independent,
resourceful, driven. All those good thingsand, hopefully, some of
them rubbed off on me. She told you what was on her mind, what
she thought you needed to know. And the great kicker is shes a
beautiful woman. Sometimes she looks dead-on like Donna Summer.
Sometimes she looks like Diana Ross. She hates it when people
compare her to Donna Summer.
My mothers background was completely different than my
fathers. She grew up in Brooklyn, on the same block as Earl Graves,
the founder and publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, and Frankie
Crocker, a pioneer of R&B radio at WBLS-FM in New York, and a
whole bunch of people who turned out to be extremely successful
and accomplished, so she was surrounded by aspiring, dedicated
people, even as a young girl. She went to Boys and Girls High. She
competed in the first Miss Black America contest, and in one of the
preliminary Miss America pageants, to represent the state of New
York. She was into jazz and dance. She was one of the first black
females to work in the Playboy club in New York, as a hostess, but
she wanted better than that. She wanted more. She was a real striv-
ing, enterprising soul. She used to keep one of those giant two-foot
can openers hanging on the wall in our house, with the words Think
Big printed across it, and that was like her mantra. She used to say,
It takes the same energy to think small as to think big. Whenever
I went to her, thinking one way about something, shed say,
Bigger. Whatever I wanted out of life, shed say, Bigger. I grew
up wanting a little bit more. I was taught to aim high.

>> MOTHER KNOWS BEST

I get my discipline, my focus, and my drive from

my mother. Like a lot of my boys from the neighbor-

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 home

hood, thats were It begins and ends for me. You

have to realize, she was never the kind of mother
who studied all these parenting guides, or did
things by the book, but she had a way about her.
She knew her stuff, and what she didnt know she
managed to figure out.
One of the biggest things she did, back when I
was about to start high school, was take out a
mortgage on the house so she could stop working.
Eighty-thousand dollars, which she figured would
be enough for us to live on for three or four years,
long enough to help steer me through the period
of time she thought Id be most vulnerable to the
negative influences of our neighborhood. Shed
always worked two or three jobs, but she wanted
to be a little more present in my life just then, to
make sure I didnt go down the wrong path. And
she was. She didnt hover over me, but she was
always around. Like a stealth watchdog. I didnt
always notice her, but she was there. And she made
me a promise. She knew that clothes were impor-
tant to me, that my appearance was important to
me, so she told me that if I kept up my grades in
school shed do whatever she had to do to keep
decent clothes on my back, so I could have my self-
respect. The two went hand-in-hand, far as I was
concerned. We didnt have a lot of money, but she
said, Daymond, I dont care what it takes. Ill sell my
body if I have to. You just worry about your end.
She could be so outrageous, so raunchy, but I

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DISPLAY OF POWER

got her point. Thats how she was. First time I

went away to summer camp, she gave me a bunch
of condoms. I was only twelve, and shes loading
me up with condoms because shes trying to be a
realist and because she knew what kids were in to.
I dont think it ever occurred to her that Id wind up
selling them to the other kids at camp, but that
wasnt the point. She was just on top of it, you
know. Nothing she got out of any book, or picked
up on any talk show, because what mother in her
right mind talks to her teenage son about selling
her body? Or gives him condoms before he heads
off to summer camp? But my mother told it
straight. And she backed it up. I always had some
decent pants, decent shirts, decent kicks until I
scraped together enough money on my own to buy
these things for myself. And she watchdogged me.
She had my back.
When I was a little older, and my friends started
drinking or taking drugs, she told me to bring some
of it home and shed do it with me, right at our
kitchen table. Shed never taken any drugs, but she
said, If you want to experiment, well experiment
together. I thought, How sick is that? Turned me
off to the whole deal, but she knew what she was
doing. She put me in her shoesand herself in
mine. She knew the idea of me getting high with
her was probably the ultimate buzz kill, and she
was dead on. I still went out and did stuff with
my friends, but nothing heavy, maybe because I

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 home

couldnt get that image out of my head, of my

mother doing the same thing.
Like I said, she was on the low about this stuff.
Subtle. For a stretch in there, she used to keep a
jigsaw puzzle going. Seems like nothing now, but
those jigsaw puzzles were a huge thing with us.
Every couple months, wed get started on a new
one. Id come home from school, Id sit down, wed
work on the puzzle, and wed get to talking. I didnt
even realize it, but she would draw stuff out of me.
It was a great little trick of hers. Wed work the
puzzle, and Id have no idea she was pumping me
for information, or that I was really listening to
whatever it was she had to say. And shed pass on
these pearls of wisdomlike, you dont get rich off
your day job, you get rich off your homeworkand
Id soak it up. I read the same thing in a book, a
couple years later, but back then I had no idea what
she was talking about.
Of course, on some level, I guess I knew full
well. I knew my mother was always working those
two or three jobs, and she still came home and
went to work on something else. She started mak-
ing clothes. She tried to get a car service going.
She tried to get a catering deal going. And I came
to realize that whatever job she did out of the
house, she was working for someone else. She
would always hit a glass ceiling. But this other stuff,
this getting-rich-off-your-homework-business, there
was no limit to what she could accomplish. And the

9
DISPLAY OF POWER

truth is, nothing ever came of any of that, but that

didnt stop her. She kept at it. She sold some of
her clothes, but it never amounted to much, and
still shed tell me it was fulfilling. Shed get some-
thing out of it. Shed tell me, Sometimes its doing
what you love that makes you rich. Sometimes, its
having something to dream about.

Heres another thing you need to know about my mother, because

it plays into what happened next. She was a talented seamstress. It
could have been a career for her, if she didnt have all these other things
going on. She sewed a lot of my clothes, in part because money was
tight but also because she really enjoyed making me nice things and
knowing I appreciated them. When I was old enough she taught me
how to work a sewing machine and put me to work finishing some of
her pieces. Before long, I could sew a button or hem a pant leg. My
mother prided herself on the fact that her clothes didnt look cheap or
homemade. A lot of kids, their mothers would make them something
and itd look like crap. But my mothers clothes were hot.
Let me get back to that aim high business for a minute. Like most
kids in my neighborhood, it took a while for my aim to catch up with
my mothers expectations. I missed the mark from time to time. Hell,
I missed the mark most of the time. I ran every kind of hustle, even
in first or second grade. The older I got, the more I bent the rules. My
big racket in grade school was selling pencils. Id pick up all the
dropped pencils I could find in school, or pinch loose pencils when
their owners werent looking, then Id shave the yellow paint off the
sides with a pen knife so they were no longer identifiable, put my
own little designs on them and sell them for a quarter. Id collect all
the other kids lunch money, selling them their own pencils, which I

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guess put me somewhere between a budding entrepreneur and a

budding hustler.
One of my other hustles, early on, was to tramp through the
dumpster behind the glass factory, around the block from my house.
They used to throw out all these slightly damaged mirrors, all these
irregular pieces, and Id collect what seemed salvageable and
smooth out the rough edges with sandpaper and sell them for a dol-
lar or so, as compacts. The girls would just grab this stuff up. Id work
the street corners by my house, or take them to school. And I wasnt
the only one doing it. There were a bunch of us in that dumpster, only
the other guys would just collect the glass and smash it someplace
else, or throw it at girls. Best I can remember, I was the only one who
thought to sell it to the girls, to turn them into customers, so I guess
you could say my entrepreneurial streak wasnt shared with the other
kids in my neighborhood. I saw opportunity, where everyone else saw
distraction. I made a market, where they were just making noise.
I was always doing something to make money, because in my
neighborhood money was power. It kept us going. Im not talking
about keeping our household going, or buying groceries, but the
money you had in your pocket. The I Got Bank money. That was
the measure of the man you might become. It was an all-important
gauge, how you valued yourself, how others looked back at you.
When I was about ten, I started picking up these used bikes people
would leave out on the street for the trash collector. I would take the
parts that were still good and stockpile them and after a while I started
building some good, working bikes out of other peoples garbage.
Sometimes Id get used parts from the local bike store, on Jamaica
Avenue. Id go in there with my mothers boyfriend Steve, who turned
up when I was about twelve and quickly became like a father to me. He
took an interest in what I was doing, and he tried to help me out.
I turned my backyard into a little factory. I was always out patrolling
the neighborhood, looking for a certain-size tire, or a decent seat, or a

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DISPLAY OF POWER

reasonable-enough looking set of handlebars. There was another kid

named Tony, he was a couple years younger than me, and I put him
to work as my assistant. We were forever in search of parts. I dont
know that I paid Tony all that much, but I must have given him some-
thing, maybe a bike every once in a while. Something to keep him
committed to the enterprise. Probably as little as I could get away
with, instead of as much as I could afford. He ended up driving for me
a bunch of years later, after Id gotten FUBU off the ground, and work-
ing as my assistant, so I must have been a decent boss when I was a
kid, else he would never have come back for more.
Course, I didnt credit my mother at the time, but I took her
words to heart. Her line about how you get rich off your homework
made a whole lot of sense to me, and from that point on I had a side-
line going. I kept thinking big. And I made sure there was always
something to dream about.

>> DRIVE (LITERALLY)

My mother was always trying to get something

off the ground, to turn some sideline into a front-
line business. For a year or two, she worked this
livery route at night, in and around Hollis. It was a
real West Indian move. A lot of people we knew
from the islands were into the same thing, so she
decided to go for it. All you needed was a car, and
a customer with someplace else to be. Nobody
worried about cab licenses or city regulations or
anything like that.
When I was older, I ran a van route of my own,
in South Jamaica, and I got the idea from my mom.
Going back to when I was a kid, Id sit with her in

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the front of our Eldorado, our family car, at the

butt end of rush hour, picking up the commuters as
they came out of the subway station at 179th
Street and Hillside Avenue, and for 50 cents theyd
jump in the car and wed car-pool them home,
straight along the Q2 bus route in Hollis.
We werent licensed. We werent catching fares
for an established company. We were just there,
looking for people who needed a ride home after
work, people who didnt want to bother with the
bus. It was a tough way to earn some extra money,
and it wasnt the best environment for meit was
actually dangerous, running all over town on a
school nightbut wed ferry these strangers home
and in-between the pick-ups and the drop-offs my
mother would teach me about people. Shed say,
Daymond, did you notice the way that last cus-
tomer said thank you when we dropped him off?
Or, That one will be successful, cause he looks
you in the eye. Whatever it was, shed see it as
some teaching opportunity, and wed drive on
through the nightme doing my homework, my
mother schooling me between carloads, the money
coming in a dollar at a time, keeping us ahead of
our bills.

There was one hustle after another, and most of them were on
the straight side of legit, and pretty soon I started looking for paying
jobs wherever I could find them. Id hand out fliers announcing the
opening of the Jamaica Coliseum, or Id roam the booths at the flea

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DISPLAY OF POWER

market on Rockaway Boulevard and be an extra set of eyes and ears

for all these vendors. I dont think I was ever without a job, from the
time I was ten years old, and on top of each job was a hustle. This
flea market security gig was a little strange. Id tell the vendors
when people were stealing, and theyd throw me five dollars for my
trouble. I realized early on that if I put together enough clients, I could
really maximize my profits, because as long as I was on the scene
and on the clock patrolling one booth, I might as well patrol the
booths nearby at the same time. So I set about convincing as many
vendors as I could that they needed my services.
Trouble was, this one gig didnt last all that long, because I didnt
see myself as a snitch, although if I was a little more conniving and
scheming I might have seen an opportunity playing both sides, col-
lecting money from the vendors to guard their booths and another
chunk of change from my boys for looking the other way while they
lifted some goods. That would have been the way to play it, but that
wasnt me, at least not just yet, even though it does give you an
idea of the mindset you develop in a neighborhood like Hollis. Get
rich or die tryinthat could have been our credo all the way back
then, and as we got older our hustles got a little less innocent, a
little more involved, a little more suspect. I started to make my share
of trouble, and to run with a crowd that made even more. Thats just
how it was, and I dont set that out to justify my behavior but to set
the scene. Where I come from, you got caught up in the same cur-
rents that moved everyone else, or you got left behind. We used to
say wed either be dead or in jail by the time we hit twenty, so we
didnt think that far out. Everything was all about the moment.
There was no planning for any future, because you couldnt count
on any future.
After a while, I started to realize that the money I could make on
my nickel-and-dime enterprises would never amount to the paper I
needed to get the things I wanted or the respect on the street I was

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starting to crave, so I looked to a bunch of minimum wage-type jobs.

I worked at a cookie store. I worked at a popcorn stand. I worked the
deep fryer at Churchs Fried Chicken, which was probably the nasti-
est job you could have. Back then, minimum wage was about $4.00
an hour, and maybe they paid as much as $5.00 at some of these
places, but it was just pure drudgery, you know. A slow train to no
place you wanted to be. The trick was hanging around long enough
to figure out a way to beat whatever system they had you working,
before management figured out you were on to something and got
around to firing you. And then all you did was bounce to some other
job, around some other corner. Thats the great tug-and-pull of these
low-paying jobs, in our poorest communities, and I got caught up in
it for a while: lose one job and theres always another to take its
place, and still no clear way to get ahead.
First time I saw any kind of real money was when I took a job as
a junior counselor at a Y camp in upstate New York, in a town
called Tuxedo. Tall Timbers, that was the name of the place.
Wasnt exactly honest money, but it was real enough. The deal
was, most summers, I would go away for a month or two at a time
to visit family or friendsin California, Hawaii, Bermuda, Canada,
Trinidadwherever my mom could arrange for a place for me to
stay. Its like she had her own little Fresh Air Fund program going.
Her idea was to get me out of the city, but she also wanted me to
see that there were other ways of life out there, other points of
view I might take up as my own. Plus, she wanted me to see the
world. Already, she could see I might wind up running with a ques-
tionable crowd, and she probably thought that if she exposed me
to enough positive influences I might make some better choices.
It wasnt a bad strategy, because I really did take to some of these
places. Pace of life, priorities, practical concerns . . . everything
was a little different outside of Hollis, and my mother was smart to
open that up to me.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

And then she sent me to this YMCA camp one summer, when I
was about twelve years old, and I liked it enough to re-up as a junior
counselor when I was fourteen. You had to be a certain age before
they felt you were mature enough to be in a position of responsibil-
ity, but I dont think they figured on me and my boys Carl and Omar.
Oh, we were mature and responsible, alright, but you couldnt really
count on us to stay within the bounds of civil behavior. We probably
bent every rule they had at that camp, and a couple local laws
besides. But that was just after-hours stuff. When I was actually
working, they had me taking care of handicapped kids, which I
thought was pretty cool. It was a general camp, with a general pop-
ulation, but they did have a small group of kids who were emotion-
ally or physically disabled, and thats where I was assigned. I liked it
well enough. We all got along. Thered be one or two kids I was
assigned to personally, and then I also had some general responsibil-
ities. And for the most part I was a model counselor, but there was a
whole lot of wiggle room in the most part. Anyway, far as any of the
camp directors knew, I was a model counselor. Put a camera on me,
though, and you wouldnt have to look through too much tape to find
evidence to the contrary.
The pay was next to nothing, and we couldnt count on any kind
of meaningful tip money, so it was inevitable that a bunch of
teenage counselors would come up with at least a couple ways to
up their take-home. The summer was broken down into four or five
different sessions. Every two weeks, one group of campers would
leave and a new group would come in. It only took a session for
me to figure the place out. After that, I had that camp wired. I got
pretty good at the bumper pool table they had in the rec hall, and
I turned myself into a real pool shark by the end of the summer,
hustling all the other counselors and campers out of their pocket
money. After a while, I started going into town on my evenings off,
loading up on cigarettes and beer, and then coming back to camp

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and selling the stuff at a premium. Campers, counselors . . . Id sell

to anybody, with a real nice mark-up for my trouble. Id also brought
a couple bags of weed with me, up from New York, and I sold off
my stash, one joint at a time. I didnt think of it as dealing. I thought
of it as sharingand it just worked out these the people I was
sharing with were sharing their money with me in return. That was
my take on it.
It wasnt exactly my shining hour. We had a scam going where
wed steal all kinds of stuff from the campers, and then sell it to the
next group of campers in for the next session. Wed never steal from
the handicapped kids in my care, thats where I drew my moral lines,
but everyone else was fair game. All the other kids in the camps gen-
eral population, wed grab their flashlights, their batteries, their hand-
held video games, whatever theyd leave lying around. Anything we
thought we could re-sell. Our business plan was, if they werent
smart enough to lock up their stuff and keep it from their grimy coun-
selors, it deserved to be stolen. It was on them.
Our biggest haul was flashlights. One session, we must have
grabbed about fifty. Some high-end lanterns, some crappy little
Eveready plastic numbers. We tied them up in plastic bags wed
borrowed from the kitchen, to keep them dry, and hid them under
a huge boulder in the woods. And its not like it went unnoticed,
all these flashlights gone missing. The camp used to hold these
gatherings at night, and everyone would sit around the fire, but
nobody had any flashlights because we had taken them all.
Nobody could get back and forth to the campfire without bumping
into someone else.
It became such a problem that the camp director got up and
started screaming one night, because nobody could see a thing. The
veins were popping on his neck, thats how mad he was. He couldnt
understand what had happened to all the flashlights. He knew some-
thing was up, but he didnt have anything on any of us. So he just

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DISPLAY OF POWER

screamed out to the whole camp one night, What the hell is going
on? Is somebody trying to open up a disco? He looked so confused,
so helpless. Beaten. We just thought that was the funniest thing
wed ever seenonly we couldnt laugh too hard without giving
ourselves away.
We were like a rustic chop shop or trading post, fencing all these
camping goods and making good money. And it piled up quick. I
remember coming home to Queens at the end of that summer with
about two thousand dollars, between my salary and tips, my bumper
pool winnings, and my second-hand trading post operation. I was
only supposed to earn a couple hundred bucks, and here I came back
with all this money. I was fourteen years old, and it was all the money
in the world. I ended up buying my first car almost as soon as I came
homea 1969 Mustang, white, a little beat up but still running. My
mother had promised to match whatever money I took home from
summer camp. So she ended up kicking in a couple grand. We used
to say Ford could stand for two things, depending on what you could
afford; I didnt have the money to buy the Ford that stood for First On
Race Day; my Ford stood for Found On Road Dead.
My mother was cool. She must have known what was going on;
in fact, Im certain she did. She knew what it cost, a car like that. Even
a hoopty costs money, and she knew what I was supposed to be
making in salary that summer. I told her I did really well in tips, but she
didnt buy it. Even so, she left me alone. Thats how she usually played
it, when I got into stuff like that. She kept her eye on me, but she let
it slide, like she was waiting for me to figure things out for myself. And
I usually did, eventually. Its just that it took a big chunk of time for
eventually to roll around, and in the meantime we didnt have money
for a car like thatespecially for a car I couldnt even drive.
But that was my mothers great strength, her wisdom: she gave
me a little rope, thinking I would either hang myself with it, or use it
to lift myself up and out.

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>> WHO MOVED MY GOVERNMENT

CHEESE?

Its one thing to be poor. Its another thing to be

without pride or self-respect, and my mother saw
to it that our pockets were never empty in this
department. We held our heads up. She taught me
that being poor was a state of mind, and I grew up
thinking we were rich even though we didnt have any
money. We were rich in what mattered. She kept me
in those decent clothes. We lived in our own house
free and clear, until my mother took out that money
so she could spend more time at home with me. We
never went hungry. But money was always tight. We
werent digging in garbage cans or anything like that,
but some months we worried if wed have enough
for the electric bill. We were always scraping.
The house on Farmers Boulevard, that was our
nut. My mother used to say that real estate was
the most important thing you could own. It was
right there in the name. Real estate. Something
you could build on. Something real.
All that scraping, early on, got me thinking. I
used to pick up these giant blocks of government
cheddar from my friend Carl Brown, whos now
one of my FUBU partners. Id known Carl since we
were six years old. His grandfather was a minister,
and his parents would become ministers, and we
used to get a lot of that subsidized food and sup-
plies from them. Powdered milk. Eggs. Pasta.
When my mother was working her crazy schedule,

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DISPLAY OF POWER

shed leave the food out for me to cook for myself.

She taught me how to get around the kitchen.
At eight, I could make a mean plate of spaghetti,
or a mess of scrambled eggs, and when I started
to move around town on my own, in and out of the
bodegas and mom-and-pop stores that lined the
streets of Hollis and Jamaica, I started to realize
how much everything cost. Id hear it from my
mother, too. Shed drive to the white neighbor-
hoods, because our money went a little further
there. Id think, It doesnt make sense how all these
goods are more expensive in the ghetto. Groceries.
Hardware. Household items. And we were buying a
much lower cut of meat, for example. That was
the first time in my life I realized how tough it is on
our poorer classes. Its like everythings conspiring
against you, even the basic cost of living.
And so you adapt. You recognize that the deck
is stacked against you, but you play it anyway. You
work a little harder, save a little more aggressively,
plan a little more diligently. You drive a bit out of
your way, to shop in the white neighborhoods. You
find a reason to go to the butcher on the Upper
West Side, to get that better cut of meat for
your family. You buy in bulk. You take those food
stamps, if youre entitled to them, and you use
them with your head held high. You reach out to
your friends for that block of government cheese.
Whatever you have to do to get and keep an edge,
thats what you do, and at the same time you con-

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tinue to support the small store owners in your

community, because they rely on your dollars every
bit as much as you rely on them to maintain that
sense of community that youve come to value.

So there we were, with a car I couldnt drivea car I couldnt

afford and soon enough we had spent down the $80,000 mortgage
on the house. Its not like we blew the money. We lived off of it, for
nearly three years. My mother used it to buy herself some time away
from work, to keep me out of trouble. Wed been broke before, and
now we were broke all over again. A couple times, it looked like the
bank might actually foreclose on us, but we got it together and kept
ourselves afloat. Theyd cut our electricity every now and then, and I
remember for a while we had to heat our bathwater on the stove.
Sometimes, Id stand at the stove and give myself a straight-up
sponge bath. We lived off food stamps. Every month, it seemed,
wed stand in line at the Con Ed office in Jamaica, and ask for some
kind of relief on our electric bill. I look back on those bills now and
quietly seethe, because they ran to $600, $700, $800 a month, and
years later, after I was finally making real money and living in a big
house in a nice part of Long Island, my bills never got close to that.
Just another example of how tough it is to get it going when you
dont have a whole lot going on.
We were a good team, me and my mother. I look back now and
think its amazing, what I took in, what I learned by example. She
sewed, so I learned to sew. She loved to travel, so I learned to love to
travel. She worked, more than one job at a time, and she usually worked
her own deal on the side, so I learned to work, more than one job at a
time, with another side deal always cooking. She mortgaged the house
to help pay for something she couldnt provide on her own, and years

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DISPLAY OF POWER

later, when that mortgage was paid off and I was getting my business
going, I did the same thing. It took writing this book and looking back
over my shoulder for me to really recognize how much I patterned
myself after my mother, and the great, lasting lesson, which I carry with
me now as a parent, is that your kids are watching. Always. Whatever
you do, theyre taking notes, so you better do it well, and get it right, or
theyll repeat the same mistakes somewhere further down the road.
Thats how it was, with me and my mother. Whatever came our
way, we faced it down. We dealt with it. I got through my high school
years, through that time she thought I might be headed for trouble,
and she went back to work. She got a job with American Airlines,
which was a nice bonus because it meant we could fly stand-by any-
where on Americans route. Me, I started bouncing from one mini-
mum wage job to the next, and once I started working I tried to be
less of a drain on my mothers pocketbook. I dont think I actually con-
tributed to our household expenses, but I took care of my own
needs. I bought my own clothes. And a funny thing happened: the
older I got, the more I started to strike out on my own, the more it
became important to me to be respected in any room I entered.
Dont know where that came from, but that was key. Maybe it had to
do with my dad, and that Napoleon complex. Maybe it was me over-
compensating for how hard we had it, in terms of money. Again, I
dont mean to cry poor. We had it better than most. We had our own
roof over our heads. But sometimes that roof leaked. Sometimes we
couldnt afford to make repairs. And sometimes we had to do with-
out in order to keep what we had.
I met another of my future partners, J Alexander, when I was
going to middle school. Id gone to Catholic school all the way through
seventh grade, St. Gerard Magellan in Hollis, but seventh grade didnt
really count. Not the first time, anyway. Heres what happened.
When my parents were going through their divorce, I started acting
up. A lot. School had always been easy to me, but I was failing this,

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and failing that, and not really caring. The school guidance counselor
could see what was going on, and they would have passed me any-
way, but my mother did a very unusual and courageous thing. She
stepped in and insisted that the school hold me accountable for my
actions. I didnt know this at the time, of course. All I knew was that
my guidance counselor gave me one last chance to pass one last
test. I took the test and failed it on purpose. I didnt get what was at
stake, or maybe I did and failed it anyway. And then my mother came
in and told the school to fail me, and to make me repeat seventh
grade, which was what I deserved. She wanted me to be account-
able for my actions, and to know that my parents couldnt bail me out
of every situation. And then she told me she was tired of working
night and day to send me to private school, if this was how I showed
my appreciation. She said she could work two jobs instead of three.
(Just a side note: my mother got skipped twice; my father got
skipped once; so I leveled the playing field a little by getting left back.)
Sad to say, my mother wound up taking on that third job again the
following summer, just to keep me under lock and key. Id done some-
thing to piss her off and earn myself a summer-long punishment, but
she couldnt stay at home from her main job to keep an eye on me so
she had to hire some neighborhood lady to watchdog me. And she
couldnt afford it, either, so she took another job just to pay the babysit-
ter. Gives you an idea how important discipline was to my mother.
Gives you an idea of the lengths she would go to keep me in line. And
it gives you an idea how she would stick to her word, no matter what.
Anyway, thats how I ended up in public school, repeating sev-
enth grade, just to prove a point. I went to IS 238, on Hillside Avenue
and 182nd Street. It wasnt too far from our house, but it was way
out of my comfort zone. These kids were just like monsters to me.
Its like they were eating their young. I dreaded going there at first.
There was a pretty famous gang, based in the Bronx, but it reached
down all the way into that school. Zulu Nation. Those guys were actually

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DISPLAY OF POWER

at the forefront of the development of rap and hip-hop music in New

York City, so this was heavy duty stuff, and to a kid from Catholic
school it was night and day. There were fights all the time, and
people getting jumped for their sneakers. It was like being sent to
prison, thats how I looked at it, like every day youd half-expect to
see camera crews from the six oclock news.
And then I met J, and we started to hang out. He wasnt like any
of my other friends. Walking around in nice, clean, styling clothes
wasnt important to him, the way it was important to me. His parents
were very restrictive, while my mother was pretty relaxed about a lot
of things. He was a real quiet student. I used to catch all kinds of
drama from the cool kids for hanging out with him, because its all
about reputation when youre in school, but I didnt listen to any of
that. I liked J. Didnt matter to me what my other friends thought
about it, and I looked up one day and realized Id put together my own
little rag tag collection of friends, from this and that crowd. I had my
gangsta friends, my drug dealer friends, my friends who were into
music, my friends who were into a little bit of everything. And then I
had my friends like J, who kind of did things their own way, and at
some point I figured out that it takes all kinds of people to make this
world pulse. This world, this neighborhood, whatever . . . Queens
basically was my whole world at that stage, so even when I was fol-
lowing my mothers advice and thinking big, I wasnt thinking beyond
the borough. That was big enough for me.
Ive met a lot of successful businessmen and women, and if I had
to pick one common trait that links most all of them its their ability to
interact with people. All kinds of people. And thats been the case with
me. Ive been plugged in to all these different groups, all these differ-
ent social circles, since way back. And it wasnt a conscious effort on
my part. It just worked out that way. I liked what each of these groups,
each of these individuals, had to offer, and I was comfortable enough
with myself to ease right in to almost any social situation.

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Middle school rolled into high school, this time in Bayside. Thats
where I met Keith Perrin, who also ended up being one of my part-
ners. First time I ever met him, he had a ski cap on, middle of sum-
mer. Nowadays, of course, that ski cap is a staple but back then
nobody was wearing them in the heat of summer. Didnt matter to
Keith, though. Hed just had some kind of accident, and he had this
bloody bandage on his head, so he threw the ski cap on to cover it
up and went about his day. For some reason, we just hit it off, and as
I started to put together this eclectic group of friends, with all these
different interests, all these mindsets, I started to feel more and
more comfortable in my own skin. I started to put myself out there a
little bit, in ways I would have never considered if it had been just me.
LL Cool J and Run DMC and all those guys were just hitting big,
and most of them were from Hollis, so music was a big, big thing to
us, and we started to see all this money rolling into the neighbor-
hood. Guys riding around in Mercedes Benzes and Alfa Romeos and
Jettas and Maximas. Guys flashing some serious jewelry. The money
was coming from rap music, and from drugs, and those two rivers of
cash flow ran into each other and trickled down to the rest of us. And
the thing is, these guys continued to live in the neighborhood, LL and
them. Part of that was because rap wasnt paying a whole lot in those
days, and even though theyd hit it big, in terms of national exposure
and record deals and all that, it didnt necessarily translate into big
bucks, and part of that was because Hollis was who they were. I
mean, where else were they gonna go?
I knew these guys a little bit. I knew their families. I knew their
stories. We all knew each other to say hello, and for a while I took up
break dancing and got pretty good at it, so these guys started to
know me from that as well. In fact, I spent so much time at it I was
offered a spot as a dancer with a group called Houdini, which was
popular at the time. They wanted me to go on one of their tours, and
I didnt even have the guts to ask my mother if I could. I knew shed

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DISPLAY OF POWER

say no, so I just let the offer slide. Turned out they gave my spot to
another kid named Jermaine Dupri, whos now a huge player in the
music industry. He ended up being the juggernaut of the Atlanta
music movement, discovering Kris Kross, Bow Wow, Da Brat and
many other artists. Even today, hes one of the most influential
people in the music industry, and one of the few people of his stature
whos honest and real. He took that Houdini gig and made some real
noise with it. I guess he didnt have to ask his mother for permission.

>> RE-MIX

Music was a tremendously big deal to me as a

kid. It wasnt just the soundtrack to every thing,
and it wasnt just me. It had an impact on my whole
community. You have to realize, rap music, hip-hop
culture, break-dancing . . . it was all tied together,
and it was all incredibly exciting and raw and new. It
was in our face, you know. These guys were our
Beatles, and we were thick in the middle of this
incredible new phenomenon, like Hollis was our own
little Liverpool. And you could feel it, all around. The
music was in the way we moved, the way we talked,
the way we dressed. As KRS-1 says, Hip-hop is
not something you do, its something you live.
For the first time, we started to care about
what we put out, how we presented ourselves.
There wasnt a FUBU for us to latch onto in those
days, so we borrowed from all these different
brands and developed our own look, our own
style. Adidas, Le Coq Sportif, Izod, Le Tigre,
Levis, Reebok, Lees . . . this stuff wasnt meant

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for us, necessarily, but we wore it like it mattered.

And it did.
And we knew what we were into. We knew what
we liked. We knew this music was important, that it
would make a dent, and thirty years later, were still
listening to it. You can make the case that its the
dominant form of music these days, and hip-hop cul-
ture has been the driving force behind our success
at FUBU, and behind the success of many other
brands. But back then, it was all starting to perco-
late. Back then, we were all starting out. And we all
felt like a part of it. It was ours. It started up in the
Bronx, but it quickly filtered down to us. Now its for
everybody all across the countryall around the
world, evenbut at that time it was just for the kids
in the inner boroughs of New York City. We owned it.

Very quickly, music became such a central part of our lives that
we started following our favorite artists around the country, watching
them perform. First part of my life, the music on the radio wasnt
really speaking to me. Hall & Oates? The Bee Gees? Not exactly my
thing. But things started to change, around the time I hit middle
school. All of a sudden, music became our cultural driving force and
I got caught up in it, same as everyone else I knew. I was fourteen,
fifteen, sixteen years old, and rap promoters were staging these
great shows. Artists like the Fat Boys, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Houdini,
Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick . . . all on
one bill. First one I remember was the Fresh Fest tour, and it was
probably the first big rap and hip-hop tour in the country, and we
wanted to be a part of it. It was like those old rock n roll shows, all

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these artists taking turns, selling out Madison Square Garden, or

these great outdoor stadiums. There were girls and drugs, and
money changing hands. It worked out great for me, because I had
those flying privileges at American Airlines, so I could jump to this or
that city without spending anything, or sometimes wed take my
Mustang, or someone elses van.
And because we knew a lot of the artists, and lived in the same
neighborhood, a lot of times theyd throw us a hotel room, and wed
squeeze fifteen people into that room if we had to, just to stretch our
money as far as it would go. Or maybe wed sleep in the van, if
money was tight. After a while, there were two or three tours, criss-
crossing the country, so there was always a show, somewhere.
There was the Bobby Brown tour. There was the New Edition tour.
The Fresh Fest became an annual event. So that went on all through
high school for me, thats what my weekends were like, chasing
these tours up and down the east coast. We lived for them, really.
Before long, a couple of my buddies started working as roadies.
Whatever work they could find, to keep close to the action. Some of
them dropped out of school. And some of them took their diplomas
and figured theyd make it on the back of this rap music phenome-
non, which was really just starting to happen in a big way. Hype
Williams, the ground-breaking music video director, was from Hollis,
as was Irv Gotti, whod go on to his own ground-breaking (and con-
troversial) career as a record industry mogul. They were both about
the same year as me in school, and they were part of this scene too.
And the great side benefit to this, of course, was that now we had
real access to these artists. Now we could figure out where Big
Daddy Kane was staying, and we could follow him down to the
Radisson or wherever, and thered be three hundred girls outside,
and we could pass ourselves off as friends of the artists and have
these girls crawling all over us, thinking we were the next best thing
to being with Big Daddy Kane.

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It got to be a game, for those of us on the outside of the inner

circle. Wed try to get Big Daddy Kane to shout out the name of the
hotel where we were staying on stage, in one of his songs, and he
did it as a kind of present for his boys. Hed always mention his hotel,
so the girls would seek him out after the show, but some nights he
kept us waiting, and wed be backstage thinking, Oh, man, tonight is
gonna be dead. No one knows where were staying. But hed get
around to it, eventually. Some nights, theyd send me to remind him,
and then when he finally said the name of the hotel, thats when Id
go to work. Id find the best-looking girls, tell them I was with the
tour, and if they didnt believe me Id flash my All Access pass, along
with drivers license, showing where it said Farmers Boulevard,
Hollis, Queens, just to prove I was who Id say I was. It got me into
a lot of places, that drivers license. It made me a big deal, and I was
too amped to care that I was only a big deal by extension. Hey, when
youre sixteen years old, youll take it any way you can get it.
My plan, after hanging around these guys for a while, after going
to all these shows, a couple times a month, was to get rich by the
age of twenty. My idea of rich was a million dollars. I didnt stop to
think how I might make that much money, or what Id do with it once
I got it, but that was the figure I had in my head. That was the time
frame. Being rich was having a million dollars. Didnt get more specific
than that.

>> GONNA PARTY LIKE ITS 1999

I was a giant Prince fan in high school. He was

the man, far as I was concerned. I went through
this whole Purple Rain phase. I used to take my
girlfriends up to my attic. My room was hooked-up,
and my mother wouldnt bother me. Id put on

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DISPLAY OF POWER

some Prince and make it happen. I think I even had

some purple clothes.
Like a lot of guys in my neighborhood, I had it in
my head that I would be rich. Million-dollar rich. By
the time I hit twenty, though, I started to realize Id
probably be poor for the rest of my life. Scraping.
But the Prince thing wouldnt go away, and I read-
justed my idea of success to mean thatwhatever
I was doing, wherever I was doing itId find a way
to be at a Prince concert on New Years Eve, to
hear him ring in the year 2000 with that song
1999. It became a pledge I made to myself, and
I meant to keep it.
Okay, so I didnt exactly get close on my million-
aire-by-twenty pledge. But this one, even if I had to
scalp a seat in some nosebleed section for, like,
$300, I could probably handle. If that was all the
money I had at that time, Id find a way to be there.
Thats how much it meant to me as a kid, to be
able to party with Prince at the dawn of the next
millennium. And that became my new dream, my
revised measure of success, to afford a ticket to
a Prince concertnot just any Prince concert, but
his Y2K New Years Eve concert, the mother of all
concerts.
One thing about Prince, he knew how to mar-
ket. He knew about branding. I heard him give an
interview once, talking about how he knew all along
what that song would mean as the 90s came to an
end. He said it was a marketing tool, more than

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anything else, which inspired me all the more. It

was seventeen years away, but he knew theyd be
playing that song on New Years Eve, 1999, and it
was the first time I realized you could be a genius
artist and a genius businessman at the same time.
And putting those two impulses togetherthat
was the real genius move.
So heres how it went downand it was better
than any dream I could think up on my own. By
1999, the FUBU thing had happened in a big way.
I had money. I had connections. Getting a front-
row ticket to Princes New Years Eve concert was
not going to be a problem. And yet even with all the
success Id had, all the money Id made, I still thought
about this Prince show, this promise Id made to
myself. Id actually met Prince a couple times, and
hung out, and out of nowhere I got this wild invita-
tion to go out to his house in Minnesota to be a
guest for this television special he was shooting.
Turned out he wasnt going to be performing on New
Yorks Eve, but he had this special in the works,
Rave to the Year 2000, which would be pre-
recorded in, like, November, and then dropped like
a Dick Clark special on the eve of Y2K.
There were about three hundred people in the
audience, and Prince put on a great show, and I
got twisted, because of course the world was sup-
posed to end the next day after all our computers
crashed, and before he played 1999 he invited
me and a couple other people up on stage with him.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

I flew onto that stage and started playing air guitar

like it was an important part of the show. Like it
was my last great act on this earth. There were
balloons dropping, and all kinds of excitement, and
I was bouncing and sliding about on stage, getting
my groove on. Id never played the guitar in my life,
but I was going at it, and as I was playing I thought,
Okay, my life is complete. Now I can die.
For months afterwards, Id get stopped by
people in the street, saying things like, Hey, youre
the guy standing next to Prince in that Rave to the
Year 2000 show! They didnt know me as the
FUBU guy. They didnt know me at all. But they
recognized me as this guy on stage, having the
time of his life.

Back to high school. My first chance at real money was a little

shady. A bunch of my close friends I grew up with started to parlay
the money they were making selling drugs into crash carsvehicles
that had been totaled or abandoned and were being offered at auc-
tion. There were all kinds of ways to make a hustle from these cars,
and pretty soon wed created a pretty profitable car ring. There was
money coming in, money going out. Wed buy the cars at auction, fix
them up, and flip them for a nice profit. Or wed get a car, put some
insurance on it, damage it, trade in the parts, and resell the car at the
other end. None of us had the time or talent to work on these cars
ourselves, but we farmed them out to body shops around town, and
there was usually enough money in the deal for me to take out a cou-
ple thousand bucks each time I flipped a car.
We had all kinds of scams going, all kinds of cars wed be work-

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ing at any one time. Nothing illegal about it, really, except we some-
times wondered where the guys we were buying the cars from got
the vehicles in the first place. Eventually, some of the guys I was
running with got the idea theyd cut the cost of doing business sub-
stantially if they simply stole the cars instead of buying them at auc-
tionand of course, this made sense as a business model, but it
wasnt the way I wanted to make my living. I didnt judge these
friends of mine, for wanting to go down this particular road, but I
never went out and stole a car myself, even if I did go along for the
ride on a few of these stolen car deals. There was even a crooked FBI
agent who crossed our path, at some point early on in this hustle, had
us thinking we could jack cars for him at five hundred bucks a pop,
and my one buddy who took him up on it ended up applying to the
FBI Academy, and being accepted, so I guess the lesson here is that
it never hurts to grease the wheel.
Easy money and me, we didnt really get along. I didnt like the
hassle, or the headache. Believe me, I liked the making money part,
and I thrived on the hustle, but if it came too easy it usually meant
wed cut a few too many corners. It usually meant it was too good to
be true. I hated the way I had to look over my shoulder all the time,
when one of these deals was going down. I hated that feeling of being
exposed, being vulnerable, and I can remember one night, after a par-
ticularly lucrative scam, hanging with one of my boys, counting out
$90,000 in cash. It was his money, his scam, but I still couldnt get
past the amount. Id never seen that type of money, all in one place,
and I got to thinking, This cant be good. My boy went out and bought
himself a brand new BMW, and after that he started going down
south and moving a lot of drugs there. Each time hed get ready to
take off on another road trip, Id say, How long you gonna keep doin
this, man? I thought he was being greedy. Sooner or later, it would
have to catch up to him, just as sooner or later, the crash cars could
come back to bite us. And hed always say, Just this one last time.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

And of course, this one last time kept getting extended, and
extended, until eventually the cops nabbed my boy and put him
away. Hype Williams ended up making a movie about this guy and a
couple of his hustler buddies called Belly, with DMX and Nas and
all these other rap artists, and it was based on the exploits of this
crew I was running with, all through high school and just after. My
closest friends. Since way back in grade school. But I stayed on the
sidelines for all that questionable stuff. Anyway, I meant to. I never
stole anything of real value. I never hurt anybody. I never sold drugs,
except those few joints I moved that one summer at the YMCA camp
upstate. I dont mean to pass myself off as some holier-than-thou
type, or some altar boy, because that certainly wasnt the case, its
just that I wasnt cut for this kind of thing. I didnt want to go to jail. I
couldnt see being in a cage my whole life. All it took was one night in
lock-up to set me straight. All it took was me being in a car with three
of my boys and a couple guns when a cop pulled us over. We looked
pretty suspicious, four black kids in a car with guns, so they hauled us
in. My mother had to come down to get me, and I could see in her
eyes how much I hurt her. I didnt want to put her through that again.
I respected her too much. I loved her too much. I didnt want to be her
disappointment. So I left the serious law-breaking to everyone else,
and then one day I looked up and realized I didnt have the time to
make any trouble. I was too busy going to school and working my
legitimate hustles. Plus, it didnt add up. The space between legal and
illegal didnt amount to much. I figured that out early on. I knew guys
making the same money working in Churchs Fried Chicken as guys
dealing drugs. The only difference was the juice, the excitement, and
there was enough juice and excitement from the music and the girls
and the straight money that I left the other stuff alone.
Absolutely, I ran with a rough crowd, but I was essentially a good
kid. I was clean. My thing was, if you want to do something well,
youve got to be committed to it. Youve got to do it fully. Doesnt

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matter if its stealing cars, or selling drugs, or punching the clock on

some minimum wage job. You have to focus, one hundred percent.
Anything worth doing is worth over-doing, that was my thing. Youve
got to keep your eye on the prize. That message was reinforced for
me, big time, when I took a job at First Boston as a foot messenger
during my junior year of high school. I got the job through a co-op pro-
gram at my school, and the deal was Id go to school one week and
then go to work the next, at the main office in midtown Manhattan.
I went in thinking Id learn all about investment banking, but that
wasnt how it played out at all. The real lesson came in studying the
thirty or forty other messengers they had working in the mail room. I
got to know a lot of these guys really well. There were some real hus-
tling street types, like the guys Id been running with in and around
Hollis. There were some aspiring Wall Street types, hoping to get a
leg up and an inside, bottom-floor look at the workings of First
Boston. And there were the people who fell somewhere in between,
who didnt really know what they wanted out of this job, or where
they wanted to go next. Of course, there were also some people
who had maxed out on this right here, and I realized I never wanted
to be a 50-year-old foot messenger.

>> NEVER HURTS TO ASK

One of the highlights of my time working as a

foot messenger for First Boston was catching a
delivery for Donald Trump. This was long before
The Apprentice, but he was a big deal back when
I was in high school. He represented everything
money and power could buy in a city like New York.
He was success personified, and I saw his name on
my delivery slip one morning and I was determined

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DISPLAY OF POWER

to meet him. I mean, this guy had more bling than

anyone in my neighborhood, except he wore it on
his cars, his boats, his planes, his buildings. Plus,
he was a kid from Queens, just like me, so I had to
see for myself what made this guy tick.
Even then, I could see this guy had it going on.
I was fascinated at the way he put his stamp on
something so straightforward as real estate. I
mean, one high-rise building is a lot like the next one,
but every time he put up a building it was distinctive,
new, special. Wasnt just because he was slapping
his name on the thing in big, bold letters. There was
more to it than that. It was Branding 101. Yeah,
he had his name on everything, but he made sure
his name stood for something.
And so off I went to Trump Tower, determined
to meet the master. I walked over to the private
elevator bank that led to his office suite, and was
met by these beefy, 300-pound, brick-eating secu-
rity guys, in shiny black suits. I told these guys,
with just enough confidence to think I might pull it
off, that I wouldnt be able to drop off the package
unless Donald Trump signed for it himself. I have
to take it up to Mr. Trump personally, I said.
These brick-eating guys flashed me these steely
looks, like Id just told them I wanted to go out with
Ivana, and I never got in to see Donald Trump. His
security guys sent me packing. In fact, I can still tell
you the kind of wax they used on the floors of Trump
Tower in those days, because they shoved me out

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 home

of there like I was at a bowling alley, and as I slid

across that floor on my way to the door I thought,
Okay, theres always next time.
(I ended up hanging out with the Donald several
times after FUBU hit, so ha ha . . . Cant stop me,
baby.)

I tried to study the guys on the receiving end of my deliveries. Id

check out their offices, how they carried themselves, whether they
could look a simple messenger like me straight in the eye. You can
tell a lot about people by how they treat the people on the lower
rungs of the ladder of their life, and I got to thinking that if I had any-
thing to say about it Id be the guy getting the package and looking the
messenger in the eye and taking care of business. That became my
focus. The guys I knew in my neighborhood, they were headed for the
low-end, but I set my sights high. Hustling was fine, for now, and I
would keep hustling for the next while until I could get my footing, but
I told myself Id have to really hustle, and focus, and rededicate myself
if I meant to reach the other side of the transaction.

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 RISE

I blew right past twenty no richer than I was

at fifteen. I looked up one day and not a whole lot had changed. I was
still living in Hollis, still working a bunch of different jobs, still hanging
with my boys, still figuring some kind of next move. It was like a hold-
ing pattern, and I was one of the only ones standing still. A lot of my
friends from the neighborhood had scatteredsome went to college,
some moved out of town, some were in jail, some were deadbut I
kept in close touch with Carl, and J, and Keith. Carl was working in a fac-
tory. J joined the Navy and went off to fight in Desert Storm. Keith was
managing some apartments in the city. And me, I was treading water.
I thought I knew everything, but of course I had a lot to learn. I
had my crash car business going, but it wasnt really going anywhere.
I went from thinking it would make me rich, to thinking it could keep
me whole, to thinking if I could just keep from getting into trouble
over it I was doing okay. Id set the bar pretty low, I realize now, to
count myself a success just because I was keeping out of jail, but
that was the standard of the neighborhood. That was what we knew.

38
 rise

The hassle of the hustle, it got to be a real strain. My thing was

Id work a straight, legit job, with a hustle on the side. I was always
scrambling. Always scratching. Always waiting for some other shoe
to drop, dealing in what I knew might be stolen merchandise even if
I didnt steal it myself. It was no way to make a meager living. Of
course, if I could have made a killing at it, I wouldnt have cared about
the questionable ethics, or the hassle, but since it was a tough go I
turned my sights elsewhere. For a while, I had a petty scam working
to keep me in pocket money, and I mention it here to show those low
standards in full force, and how desperate I was to get a leg up. My
barometer was that I didnt want to get caught doing something I
wasnt supposed to be doing. It was never any kind of ethical
dilemma with me; it was a matter of trying to put one over, and not
getting caught, and doing what I could to avoid another one of those
disappointed looks from my mother. That just killed me. I never
wanted to see that look againand thats really what kept me hon-
est, more than anything else.
If I thought I could get away with something, I was all for it, like
this idea I had to cut the corners off a stack of singles and replace
them with the corners from another stack of twenties, and then pass
off the doctored bills to street vendors and merchants and hope to
get away with the switch. I cant take full credit for this one. Some
idiot tried to slip me one of these funny twenties when I was work-
ing the popcorn stand at the Coliseum Mall, early on in high school,
so I guess I thought Id balance the scales. The way it worked was
Id rip one corner off a good twenty and stash the small piece away.
Then Id pass the twenty at a bodega, and nobody ever cared if a cor-
ner was missing; the bill was still good. When Id stockpiled enough
corners, I went to work on the singles, and when I had enough of
these I was in business. Id buy a soda from a hot dog cart vendor,
hand him the bogus bill, and hope like hell he was too busy to notice.
Or some guy selling flowers on the street. Those crazy flower-buying

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DISPLAY OF POWER

days, like Mothers Day and Valentines Day, that was like taking
candy from a baby. Id see a guy at a street light, selling roses for a
dollar, and Id hand him the bill, get my change and my rose, and peel
away before he could notice the funny money. Sometimes, Id buy
myself a nice new pair of sneakers, and Id put a real twenty on top,
three fake twenties in the middle, and a real twenty on the bottom,
and hand the money over to the kid working the cash register and
wait for my change.
About ninety-five percent of the time, Id get back sixteen or
eighteen dollars in change for my one-dollar investment, or whatever
it worked out to be, and on top of that Id get a flower, or some
Chinese food, or a soda. The merchandise was like a little extra
bonus. And when it didnt work, I had an easy out. I ran like hell. The
few times the counterfeit twenties went bust, I was able to haul out
of that store, or down the street in the other direction, and that was
the worst of it. That was my alibi. I didnt have to worry about the
copsor, worse, my mother. I just had to worry about my con-
science, and in those days, sad to say, it didnt have too much to say
about something like this.

>> A BLANKET OF HISTORY

The numbers were out to get me and my boys.

In 1995, sixteen percent of all African American
males in their 20s who did not attend college had
spent time in prison. Ten years later, that number
was up over twenty percent. Today, more than a
third of all black men in their 30s with only a high
school education have been incarcerated, while over
sixty percent of all high school dropouts have been
in jail. And get this: among black dropouts in their

40
 rise

late 20s, there are more in prison on any given day

(thirty-four percent) than there are working (thirty
percent), according to a recent study done at the
University of California, Berkeley.
If you believe the statistics, the odds were against
me. African-American males have far lower gradua-
tion rates than their white male counterparts,
especially in urban communities, and a far greater
likelihood of winding up in jail. The numbers point to
racism, uninvolved parents, and a subculture that
doesnt value education or reward hard, honest
work. But I never believed in statistics. Nothing was
inevitable, far as I was concerned. My circumstances
might have had it in for me, but it was up to me to
see that I didnt head down the same wrong road as
most everyone else in my neighborhood. I wanted
something better for myself, something more.
I recently came across a quote from President
Lyndon Johnson, delivered to the graduating class
of 1965 at Howard University, in which he spoke
of the plight of what he called the American
Negro. Much of the Negro community is buried
under a blanket of history and circumstance, he
said. But it is not a lasting solution to lift just one
corner of that blanket. We must stand on all sides
and we must raise the entire cover, if we are to lib-
erate our fellow citizens.
I hear those words now and I take them to
heart. But as a young man, dancing in and out of
trouble, I didnt give care about liberating our fellow

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DISPLAY OF POWER

citizens. I didnt care about lifting other young

blacks, or setting a positive example. All I cared
about was getting mine, and getting away with it.

After a while, this kind of thing got a little old. It wasnt just about
staying out of jail; it was me finally paying attention to the person I
was becoming, the choices I was making. About a year out of high
school, I realized I couldnt outrun the right thing my whole life, so I
stopped passing counterfeit twenties or fixing stolen cars and I took
a job at a Red Lobster restaurant. Id always had a job, but this one
had a little bit of upside. I wanted to play it straight, and at the same
time find some way to make an honorable living. I didnt have a whole
lot of options. College didnt really make sense for me. There was too
much money going out, just to keep the house running, to think
about taking on a substantial tuition bill. Plus, I needed to do my part,
to make sure there was enough money coming in. I needed to work,
was what it came down to, and I wanted one of those jobs where I
could just leave the work at quitting time, with no worries bouncing
around in my head about what Id have to do the next day, or whether
or not Id get caught for something I may or may not have done. I
wanted to be paid with clean money, and I wanted to punch out at
the end of the day and not bring anything home with me from work
other than a plate of fried shrimp, so the Red Lobster job was per-
fect. I started out in the kitchen, but I ended up waiting tables. Thats
where the real money is, for a hired hand in the restaurant game, so
thats where I put myself.
Around the same time, as a sideline, I bought a van and started
driving my own livery route at night, just like I used to do with my
mother. The rest of the time I was chasing girls and trying to stay out
of trouble. In all, it wasnt a bad set-up, but I was starting to think

42
 rise

long-term, to wonder if I could be a waiter at Red Lobster at thirty, if

I could still be driving a van, or punching some other clock just to
keep the electricity on. I could see I had it better than most, but it
wasnt until I hit twenty that I started to think I couldnt do this kind
of thing forever.
Meanwhile, the hip-hop scene remained very much a part of our
lives, well after high school. It was what we talked about, what we
lived for, what mattered most of all. It was more than just the sound-
track to our lives; a lot of times, it was the main storyline. Our week-
ends were all about going out on these tours, and finding ways to get
our expenses covered, or finding ways to make money off the deal.
Maybe it wasnt every weekend, but there was always a road trip
coming up on the calendar, always something to look forward to. And
these shows werent just a place to get our groove on or let off some
steam. They were business opportunities. The artists didnt care if
their boys from back home made a little money on the side, so a lot
of guys I knew started selling t-shirts outside these concert venues.
For a while my big thing was to buy up a whole mess of urban-type
clothesjeans, Timberlands, parkas, sneakers . . . things I wore with-
out thinking about them, which a lot of kids outside New York
seemed to associate with our hip-hop culture. I didnt plan on doing
this, or think it through, but I started to realize that everywhere I went
outside of the city, kids wanted to buy whatever I was wearing, right
off my back.
First time it happened, it freaked me out. Some kid offered me a
lot of cash for this bomber jacket I was wearing, and I realized I could
replace it for half what he was offering me, soon as I got back home.
I thought, Done. And then I thought, Well, if this kid wants my jacket,
maybe someone else will want my sneakers, or my jeans. Right
away, I started thinking like a wholesaler. You couldnt find some of
this stuff in Atlanta, or Orlando, or Kansas City, or wherever, so I
started bringing along a couple extra pieces before each road trip. It

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DISPLAY OF POWER

got to where Id load up two or three suitcases with this stuff and try
to move it all in the parking lot before each show, and with each sale
I got to thinking, Its good to be from Queens.

>> THE GEOGRAPHY OF COOL

You could make a nice hustle, trying to antici-

pate which of our urban, hip-hop trends would catch
on in the rest of the country. Truth is, they all caught
on eventually, and the market came in timing the even-
tually. For the first time, running back and forth to
these shows on the weekends, I caught myself think-
ing how you could probably chart this kind of thing.
Theres a whole formula to it. Something hits in New
York, some type of music or clothing or lifestyle item,
and a couple months later itll filter out across
the rest of the country. It might hit next in DC, or
Philadelphia, before snaking its way down to Atlanta,
or Orlando, or Miami, and across to Detroit, or
Nashville, or Chicago. Or, maybe itll pop out in Los
Angeles, and spread east, through Vegas, and maybe
Houston or Kansas City. And by the time it reaches
the heartland, theres something new to replace it,
already making some new noise in the big city.
Even now, with cell phones and streaming video
and wireless Internet, theres still that lag, between
New York and L.A. and the rest of the country. In
a world of instant messaging, nothings instanta-
neous. It doesnt just happen that a new artist or
a new trend breaks out of the city and reaches
into middle America. Anyway, it doesnt just happen

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 rise

right away. It takes word-of-mouth, and buzz, and

the slow-burn marketing tools promoters have
been using for centuries. It takes time.
Kids in Columbus, Ohio, they want to feel like
theyre on the same cutting edge as kids in New
York or Los Angeles. It might take them a minute
to catch on to some of this stuff, but when it finally
shows up on their radar they want in, and theres
money to be made if youre the first one there to
sell it to them. I dont care what it is, theres
always something new, something hot that you
cant get your hands on in Columbus, or wherever,
and if youre the first guy who takes the time to
get it there youll usually do well with it. Thats what
Ive tried to do with FUBU and everything that fol-
lowed from itto stay out in front of these trends.
Back in the day, it was those bomber jackets
everyone in New York was wearing. Or an Adidas
track suit. Whatever was in style, Id ride out to one
of these shows and the local kids would want to buy
this stuff right off my back. Literally. For two or three
times what Id paid for the item back in New York. It
didnt take a genius to see a business opportunity. I
started small. I sold what I was wearing. And then
after a while I started buying extras. Two or three
jackets, a couple pairs of jeans, four or five sweat
suits. If I could sell ten pieces before a show, I was
doing okay. The key was to make sure you had just
enough inventory, and that you werent stuck with
anything you couldnt move. Fila sneakers. Ellesse

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DISPLAY OF POWER

sneakers. Timberlands. I found that if I left the hang

tags on the items, I could get a better price.
The other key was to gauge just how far Id be
from New York, to get some kind of read on what
kinds of clothes would be in demand. Id think what
these kids wanted on my last trip through town, and
instead of bringing more of the same, Id bring what-
ever came next back home. The next big thing, Id turn
them on to that, but in small doses. Like a dealer.
You have to realize, this wasnt any kind of real
enterprise. This was just me, generating a little
something on the side. And its not like I brought
down a truckload of goods. There was only so
much stuff I could load into my van, only so much
money I could lay out to buy the stuff in the first
placeand besides, I didnt want to spend all my
time out in the parking lot, selling clothes. I wanted
to party. So I found a balance. I sold enough to pay
for my gas, and my food, and to leave a few bucks
in my pocket besides. Just enough to remind me
that there was more where that came from.

The van was a whole other hassle. I was constantly getting tick-
ets, constantly pouring money into the operation. The cops would
harass me. I couldnt remember it being this much of a headache
when my mother was driving, but the cops were all over us drivers.
You know, I wasnt a legal livery company. I had livery plates, my van
was marked and registered, but I wasnt supposed to pick up fares in
and around the city bus stops, so theyd write me up all the time.
Sometimes just to bust my chops, and sometimes for good reason.

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I drove like a crazy man, trying to cover as much ground as quickly as

possible, to pick up and drop off as many fares as possible, so theyd
write me up for that. At one point, I was carrying a couple thousand
dollars in fines. On a good night, I could make about three or four
hundred bucks, but I gave most of that back, for gas, tickets, insur-
ance, maintenance on the vehicle. Maybe Id clear two or three hun-
dred for the weekgood money, dont get me wrong, but not
enough to think of doing it for any longer than I had to.
The hours were the real killer. Id run from five in the morning, to catch
the early commuters, until ten or eleven oclock at night. In between,
when things were quiet in mid-afternoon, maybe Id grab a couple hours
for myself, to hang with my boys or maybe catch up on some sleep, but
it was a hard day, and I had about three years of those hard days before
I decided Id had enough. I needed a break, so I re-upped at Red Lobster
and once again the restaurant job became my main thing.
Red Lobster was the perfect counter to the van business. I
busted my butt on the floor of the restaurant, waiting tables, but
there was no stress, none of the headaches I got picking up fares and
dodging those livery regulations, none of the looking over my shoul-
der that came refurbishing those hot cars. It was a different kind of
hustle, and the deeper I got into it, the more hours I worked, the
more I realized I would never be a desk-job kind of guy. I liked wait-
ing tables. I liked the action. I liked that every shift was different.
Course, I didnt want to be a waiter for the rest of my life, but I knew
I couldnt sit still. That wasnt me. I couldnt understand how people
commuted to the same job every day, pushing the same papers
across the same desk for the same paycheck. It seemed like such a
drain, working on somebody elses dream. A lot of guys I knew, they
were looking to get set up in this or that office, but I never under-
stood that corporate mentality. Never mind that I didnt have the edu-
cation. Never mind that I couldnt land a desk job in any office in New
York City, even if I held a gun to someones head in Human Resources.

47
DISPLAY OF POWER

I just couldnt understand how someone could go through the same

motions every day and call it a career.
It was one thing to dream about making it big, but to actually go
about it with a viable plan . . . that was something else. But then Id
keep hearing this line, back of my head: if you fail to plan then you plan
to fail. By the time I hit twenty-two, twenty-three, I was starting to see
a lot of the guys Id grown up with, coming into the restaurant for din-
ner. Theyd gone off to college, and now they were back home, work-
ing their first jobs. Red Lobster was a big night out for these guys, and
I always felt a little embarrassed, walking over to their table to take
their orders. Guys I used to run with. Guys I used to party with. Girls I
used to go out with. They were college graduates, and I was taking
their orders for fried shrimp and tartar sauce, and hustling them for tips.
Theyd look at me and go, Hey, D, how you doin? And then theyd
do a double-take, because back in high school I was the guy who had
the hot clothes. I was the guy with all the girls, the guy who made
things happen. And here I was, wearing my silly Red Lobster uniform,
making sure they had enough tartar sauce. Id turn my back and know
they were laughing at me, but I tried not to care. AndIm proud to
sayI managed not to spit in their food. I spit in a lot of peoples
food, usually with good reason, but never someone I actually knew.
(Like I said, I set the bar pretty low.)
Money was tight, but there was enough to keep me in what I
wanted. When I was about twenty or so, my mother moved out of
the house and into Manhattan, and I stayed on and moved in some of
my friends. J, Keith, Carl and a couple others. I collected rent. I didnt
charge a whole lot, but it was enough so I could stay ahead of our bills.
There was heat. There was electric. I held the mortgage on the house,
and that got paid, along with the taxes. I was doing alright, going out
at night, partying with girls, chilling. We were like a frat house.
I wasnt going anywhere, but things were just fine. For the time
being.

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>> ONE LESS SHRIMP

File this one under Marketing 101. Or, Too

Basic Business Strategies. Id been working at Red
Lobster a couple years. They used to have these
regular staff meetings, once a week or so, where
theyd tell us about their new promotions, their
special drinks, whatever we needed to know from
the corporate level to keep our little local place
cooking. Usually before the dinner rush, theyd get
the wait staff together and go over whatever it
was they needed to go over, and on this one night
they started telling us about this chain-wide cut-
back on their Shrimp Scampi orders. Theyd always
put, say, eleven shrimp in a regular order, and
maybe six in an appetizer, and now there was a
special corporate directive to cut back to ten
and five. They wouldnt change the price, just the
shrimp countand, at the other end, thered be a
little more money to go around out at Red Lobster
headquarters.
The deal was, with all those Shrimp Scampi
orders, all across the chain, Red Lobster would
save a couple million dollars over the course of a
year. Just from holding back one shrimp per plate.
I sat there in my little Red Lobster outfit thinking,
This is a genius move, long as it doesnt come back
to bite them. At first I thought for sure our regu-
lar Shrimp Scampi customers would notice the
change right away, and start complaining, but no
one ever noticed. No one ever said a thing. And

49
DISPLAY OF POWER

the company saved a small fortune, just on the

back of this one move.
The lesson, to a lowly waiter hoping to become
something more than a lowly waiter, was that the
little things mean a lot. They add up. Its basic, I
know, but its all-important. Keep one shrimp for
yourself, and its one less shrimp you have to keep
in inventory. It reminds me now of another genius
move from around the same time, when Pocket
Books pushed the price point on their paperback
books by four cents. Remember when paperback
books were always $4.95, or $5.95? That had
long been the industry standard, until some enter-
prising bean counter at Pocket Books came along
and realized the publisher could push that loose
change to $.99 and nobody would ever know the
difference but their shareholders. And just like
that, the standard price of all Pocket paperbacks
shot to $4.99, or $5.99, and those extra four
cents added up to millions.
Absolutely, its the little things. Studies show
that if you own a retail clothing store, you can
bump your business by as much as twenty percent
just by placing four comfortable chairs in the mid-
dle of your store. Why? Because a lot of women
shop with their husbands and boyfriends and kids,
and if they have a place to sit down they wont be
looking to leave so quickly. The women will have
more time to shop and spend money. Makes
sense, right? Just like it makes sense to serve one

50
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less shrimp, or squeeze an extra few cents from

an avid reader, or figure out some other way to
grow your business without changing your busi-
ness model or alienating your core customers.
Bottom line? It doesnt have to be a big deal to
amount to a big deal.

Over time, these road trips really forced me to think outside the
box, to be entrepreneurial. There was all this money floating around,
and I figured if I was smart about it I could redirect a little more of it
my way. Selling the clothes off my back was easy enough, and load-
ing up on extras was another no-brainer, but then I realized I could put
my van to good use hauling all kinds of merchandise to these concert
venues. Around the time of the Rodney King beating, in March, 1991,
which sparked the rioting out in Los Angeles in 1992, I printed up a
bunch of Free Rodney King! t-shirts and drove them down to a
march in DC, where I thought I could sell them for ten dollars a pop.
Here again, the idea wasnt original to me. A lot of my friends were
making good money selling unlicensed t-shirts in the parking lots
after concerts, or at sporting events. Weve all bought shirts like
these, for about half the price of the licensed t-shirts they sell inside
the arena. So I went to a place called Eva Tees in Manhattan and
bought three hundred blank t-shirts. That was all I could afford. Then
I took them out to a screen printer on Long Island, where we laid on
some artwork a friend of mine did on the computer. Rodney Kings
picture, along with our slogan.
It never occurred to me that we needed to pay Rodney King for
the use of his likeness. I just grabbed the best photo of him I could
find and went to work. Then I loaded up the van with the shirts, drove
down to the march, laid a couple samples on the grass and sold

51
DISPLAY OF POWER

through my entire inventory in nothing flat. My only regret was that I

didnt have enough money to make more shirts, and I came away
with my first lesson in business: sell-through is all-important, but if
you misread your market and dont make enough product to meet
demand, it can be a real buzz-kill.
Next, I started going to this outlet on 27th Street, and buying all
kinds of knock-off goods. Remember those super-soaker water
guns? I bought a whole mess of those, and all kinds of other items.
Little did I know, a couple years later, me and my FUBU partners
would risk our lives trying to bust-up the counterfeiters working out
of this same building, but this time I was on the scraping side of the
equation. These knock-off goods were my ticketand not the drag
on profits theyd become. Id buy something for two dollars, and fig-
ure I could sell it for five, so I started loading up the van with all this
merchandise, and all these clothing items, and hitting the road in
search of concerts, and festivals, and trade shows. County fairs.
Anywhere thered be a bunch of people with some loose change that
might have my name on it.
One day I took stock and realized these road trips had become a
lot more than R&R. I found myself counting on the money I could
make from these sideline sales, and Id catch myself thinking of new
t-shirt designs, or other selling opportunities. I went to a bunch of dif-
ferent silk screen places back home, comparing prices. And I tried to
keep enough cash on hand so I didnt top out at three hundred blank
t-shirts next time there was a great selling opportunity coming up on
the calendar.
Around this same time, I caught myself looking for a hat Id seen
in a video by this group De La Soul, these three talented guys from
Long Island. Like a lot of people in my neighborhood, I was influ-
enced by the styles of some of these early rap artists, but the influ-
ences were subtle. I dont think any of us realized we were buying
these clothes because wed seen our favorite artists wear the same

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thing. Or, if we did, we didnt really talk about it. We just grabbed on
to this or that trend and called it our own. This was really the first time
I was consciously aware of the subliminal power of music videos as a
marketing tool, and I was a textbook case. Id seen this hat, I thought
it had flavor, and I went out looking for one to add to my wardrobe. It
was a tie-top hat, and I couldnt find one anywhere in New York City.
I spent a whole day looking. Brooklyn. Queens. Manhattan. It became
a real quest. And when I finally found one, I was disappointed. They
were charging like thirty dollars for it, and the thing was so poorly
constructed it looked like it wouldnt last but a week.
Remember, I knew how to sew. I was hemming my own pants
and making alterations on my clothes since I was a little kid. I knew
a flimsy piece of crap when I saw one. But Id set my mind on that
hat, so I bought it anyway, and soon as I got home with the thing I
got out my mothers sewing machine and started sewing a couple
knock-offs. I wasnt thinking about selling these hats, just that I could
follow the pattern and do a better job of it, and at the other end Id
stockpile a few for my own use, because I knew this store-bought
one wouldnt last, and because I liked to have options when I got
dressed. I used a whole bunch of different colors, so Id have a hat
to match the trim of this sneaker, or the design of that shirt. You
might look back at a picture of me from this periodlate 80s, early
90sand think I had this thrown-together look, but it was all about
the ensemble, even down to an accessory like a tie-top hat.
Everything had to go together, in one way or another.

>> THE TRUTH ABOUT KICKS

Inner city kids are extremely status-conscious.

Thats a given. We care about our appearance. We
care about the cars we drive, the watches on our

53
DISPLAY OF POWER

wrists, the labels we put on our bodies. It says

something about us. And this is nowhere more
apparent than our footwear. Take me. I didnt have
any real money, but I always had a closet full of
sneakers. And they all had to be clean. Out-of-the-
box clean. If there was a scuff or a mark or a blem-
ish of any kind, the sneakers were of no use to me.
Going back to the earliest days of hip-hop,
sneakers were our thing. There was even a term
in the hip-hop community for guys who took this
stuff a little too seriouslysneakerheads. We
used to braid our shoelaces a certain way. Or
make little checkerboard design patterns on them.
I used to stay home Friday nights and clean the
things with a toothbrush. So when I finally had a
little bit of money, it went right to my feet. Theres
a joke here, how people say money goes to your
head, but where I grew up it was just the opposite.
Soon as I could afford it, I started buying six,
seven, eight pairs of sneakers at a time.
And it wasnt just sneakers. Back in my Red
Lobster days, I was buying a new pair of Timberlands
every two or three weeks. They didnt wear out;
they just got dirty. Even today, Ill check out some-
ones closet and see a couple hundred pairs of shoes
in there. Sneakers, mostly. And most of them are in
good shape, except for a scuff mark here or there.
Thats enough to get them retired.
You look at the ridiculous success of some of
these footwear companies, like Nike, and you can

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draw a straight line to the repeat buys from the

African-American community. Its the same five to
ten percent of their customers buying the majority
of their shoes. Just look back at the recent history
of a company like Reebok, a time-tested, success-
ful brand that kind of disappeared for a while until
they hired Peter Arnell and Steve Stout, an estab-
lished marketing guru and a music executive look-
ing to change the advertising world, and started
targeting the African-American market. Until
artists like Jay-Z and 50 Cent signed on for a full-
fledged ad campaign, joining athletes like Allen
Iverson, and all of a sudden black kids started buy-
ing them up in bunches.
Pollsters are always saying that voters or con-
sumers decide with their feet, but here it rings
especially true.

Soon, a couple friends wanted to know if I could make a hat for

them, so I turned out a few more. It was easy enough, just a piece
of fabric cut into a simple square. Then Id sew a lining on it, and take
two of these finished squares and sew them together. Boom, you
have a hat, and you tie it on the top and youre good to go. The first
few hats I made were solid colors, but then I started reaching for
some stripes, some patterns. Whatever fabric I thought looked good
or felt nice. I went to the fabric store and bought some material.
Nothing too expensive. The cost of goods for each hat was less
than a dollar, and each one took only a ten or fifteen minutes to
make, and once I started making them in bigger numbers the costs
and the production time came way down.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

Its probably useful to put my developing fashion sense into some

kind of context. In the world of hip-hop or urban clothing, or whatever
you want to call it, there were a couple fixtures. There was Brand
Jordan at Nike, and that sneaker lure was able to build a whole line
of warm-ups, tops, jackets, ball caps and related items. You couldnt
really say those items were made for the black community, but theres
no denying that they were embraced by the black community. There
was Tommy Hilfiger, which didnt seem to target blacks either. Later
on, a rumor would surface that Tommy Hilfiger didnt make his clothes
to fit black people, but nevertheless the line made its first piece of real
noise when a rapper named Grand Puba started talking about it in his
rhymes. Tommy Hilfiger on my back . . . thats just my flava. The same
artist also threw a couple shout-outs to Girbaud Jeans, and these were
really the first big designer logo rises of our urban culture. There were
bigger artists out there, but outside of Run-DMC with Adidas, no one
was dropping these brand names in their songs in such a product
placement type of way. No one was making these markets.
When I started sewing these first couple hats, there was a com-
pany called Cross Colours on the scene, and they were making
clothes out of Kinte cloth colors that called to mind the batik patterns
of certain African tribes. Plus, the texture of the fabric itself was
unique, almost like a lightweight burlap, and you started to see black
people walking around in orange jeans and purple jean jackets. Id
always been into sewing, and doctoring my own clothes, so I was
really excited by this development. I used to check out the clothes in
the stores, and consider the quality, and see if there were some ele-
ments I could layer on to the clothes I already had. I couldnt really
afford to buy the items outright, but I wanted the look.
All of a sudden, that look was everywhere. Big stars like Danny
Glover and Whoopi Goldberg would show up on red carpets and talk
shows wearing Cross Colours, and next thing you know everyone
was wearing it. Our clothes started to get baggier, and more colorful.

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 rise

Designers like Karl Kani, who came out of Cross Colours, began to
really put a stamp on hip-hop culture. The Cross Colour guys were
hot, but Karl Kani was fire. He was from Brooklyn. He looked like a
young Mike Tyson. He put his name on his clothes, and it hit me like
a bolt of lightning, that somebody like me could make a name for
himself making clothes.
The Troop line was huge for a while, but there was no personal
connection there, the way there was with Karl Kani. LL Cool J was a
big wearer of Troop, which was a Korean-owned company, but
almost as soon as that line popped in a giant way there was a rumor
on the street that the companys name stood for To Reign Over
Oppressed People. It sounds ridiculous now, but that rumor killed the
line. The Koreans didnt understand their market, and couldnt think
how to respond. They used to make those leather jackets that every-
body was wearing, and they just disappeared, and even a waiter at
Red Lobster could see the importance of building and sustaining pos-
itive relations with your core consumers if you hoped to build and
sustain any kind of real business.
Meanwhile, I kept selling my hats. Friends of mine started asking
me where they could get a hat like that for themselves, and then I
started hearing from friends of friends, and after that I started think-
ing maybe I should make a couple dozen and see if I could sell them
at some of these concerts. I closed my eyes and saw that giant can
opener my mother used to keep on the wall of our house and
reminded myself to think big. I thought, why stop at making this stuff
for me and my friends?

>> THE RIPPING POINT

One of the biggest controversies in the world of

urban apparel had nothing to do with an urban line

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DISPLAY OF POWER

of apparelat least not in any kind of traditional

sense. See, in the hip-hop community, some of our
earliest fashion choices were taken off the racks of
conservative, white-owned companies like Lacoste,
Ralph Lauren and Timberland. That was what was
out there, and available. If we saw something we
liked, we reached for it, put our own stamp on it,
and adopted it as our own.
In my neighborhood, Timberland boots were the
coolest. They werent made for us, necessarily, but
we didnt care. We didnt eat granola or hike or read
Outside magazine, same way Gucci or Burberry
didnt make items for our particular lifestyle. But
we liked our Timberlands. I always had a new pair in
my closet, ready to go when the previous pair got
a little scruffy. I liked the way they set off the cuff
of my jeans, liked the way they fit, liked that they
represented an outdoor lifestyle. Back then, I
didnt give the fact that it was a white-owned com-
pany a thought, because if I only spent my money
on stuff made and marketed by black-owned com-
panies, there wouldnt have been a whole lot for me
to buy.
We were all color-blind when it came to clothes.
We liked what we liked, until one day when some
Timberland executive came out and said they didnt
make their boots for drug dealers. Their sales
were through the roof, and they could see that
inner city kids were driving those sales, but with
this one statement they alienated a core group of

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their consumers. They nearly killed their business

and, unwittingly, started a fashion revolution, because
it was this misstep by Timberland that inspired me
to launch a company like FUBU. They did more
than just alienate us. They ticked us off, and we
went from thinking Timberland could do no wrong
to writing the company off entirely.
Almost overnight, sales of Timberland boots
flat-lined in our urban communities, while Timberland
executives scrambled to cover their butts and
recapture some of those lost sales. They werent
talking about all black kids, they tried to have us
believe. The comments were taken out of context,
they assured. They welcomed the attention from
rap and hip-hop artists in their songs and videos,
they assured.
They even launched some lame damage-control
campaign urging people to give racism the boot
a clever tag line, given the circumstances, but we
werent buying it. They put up all these billboards, in
all these ghetto communities, with a big picture of a
boot. That was their clean-up campaign, but they
were a little slow on the switch. If these guys thought
their hardcore, white-bread customers would be put
off by having all these rappers and gangsters walk-
ing around in the same pair of shoes, then we didnt
want any part of them, no matter what they put up
on those billboards. And it wasnt like there was a
meeting or anything, and every black kid voted to
wear something else. It took on a momentum all its

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DISPLAY OF POWER

own, because when youre style-conscious and status-

conscious, this kind of thing finds you. We were out-
raged, and wounded, and for the first time I realized
the power of this marketplace. Cater to us, and
well follow you anywhere. Reject us and well drive
you into the ground.

So there was all this noise about Timberland bouncing around my

head, all these thoughts about branding and marketing and finding a
way to connect with your customers beyond the product itself, all
these positive connections to a guy like Karl Kani and the bolt of light-
ning that told me you could be young and hip and black and still find
a way to develop a line of clothes. I read a lot of books. My favorite,
Think and Grow Rich, I try to read at least once a year. It taught me
to write down my goals and to read them back every morning and
every night. It also taught me desire, which the author says is the key
to everything else. My thing here in this book is power, but you cant
have power without desire. The one follows from the other, and this
was how I was thinking all the way back then.
There was a lot to think about, and it occurred to me that if I was
going to sell these hats I should probably come up with a name. I should
associate myself with these goods in some way beyond the simple
transaction. It was different than those silk-screened t-shirts, because
back then nobody bought a t-shirt and paid attention to the label, but I
knew that young people were really into labels and the stature that
came with them and I thought I could create something bigger than just
a duffel bag filled with tie-top hats. I thought I could make a business.
I think I was probably drunk at the time, but Ive since realized
that being clear-headed has nothing to do with clarity of vision. Truth
be told, I had some of my best ideas when I was out partying with

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my friends, and the first of these came one night at my house on

Farmers Boulevard, just sitting around with Keith, Carl, J and them,
drinking, talking about what we might do next. I was all excited about
these tie-top hats, and I guess my mind was working in a kind of
Timberland backlash mode, because I blurted out the phrase, By Us,
For Us. Dont know where it came from precisely, dont know what
the conversation had been leading up to this moment, but I liked it as
soon as I heard it back. By Us, For Us. It had a certain pride of own-
ership to it, a certain simplicity. It commanded respect. And I dont
know that I recognized it as such at the time, but it was a little bit of
a rebuttal to what was going down with Timberland. No, those boots
werent made for us, but these hats would be. Hats, shirts . . . what-
ever came next. We were the market we intended to serve, and the
name reinforced the point.
The bonus was that it came with a cool acronym. At least, we all
thought it was cool, that first drunken night. BUFU. By Us, For Us. It
was strong, in-your-face, memorable. I was thinking of a guy like Karl
Kani, how in a short time he had become so completely identified
with his clothes, like it was a real pride of stewardship thing. He put
himself in his ads. He put his name on his clothes. I thought I could
rope my friends into whatever business I could build on the back of
these hats, and that wed put ourselves in our ads, and wed put our
name on our clothes, too. That was my loose plan.
I went out and printed up a bunch of BUFU labels at a silk
screener I was using, and a week or so later some guy came up to
me on the street and asked me if I was gay. Id sewn one of the
labels into one of my hats and taken it out for a trial run. I thought,
Where is that coming from?
He said, You know what that means? He was from down
south, and spoke with a thick accent.
I said, By us, for us. Its the name of my new company.
He said, No, thats not what it means.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

I thought, Oh, damn. Now what do we do? Still, I liked the name
and the concept behind it too much to scrap it entirely, so I switched
it around to FUBUFor Us, By Us. I had some new labels printed up,
and on the Friday afternoon before Easter Sunday, 1991, I took a
small bag stuffed with forty hats to the Coliseum Mall at 165th Street
and 89th Avenue in Jamaica and went to work. My boy Keith came
along to help me out. We didnt have a permit. We didnt have a strat-
egy. We just stood out there in front of the mall, pretty much on the
same spot I used to stand back when I was a kid, handing out fliers
for the flea market, and started slinging my hats. Turned out we were
standing next to a couple guys who ended up calling themselves the
Shabazz Brothers, who were also selling tie-top hats, and who would
go on to develop their own line of urban clothing, but I tried not to let
the competition bother me. I actually liked their hats a little better
than mine. They were of better quality. But there was room enough
on that street for all of us. And there were a couple elements in that
Shabazz Brothers hat I could incorporate into my FUBU line when I
went back into productionso it was my first experience checking
out the competition and seeing if I could do my job any better.
We ended up selling every last hat, for twenty bucks a pop. Took
just a couple hours for our sell-through. That came to eight hundred
dollars, which to a hustling street kid like me was more money than
Id ever come by honestly in a days work. Okay, so there were two
of us out there hustling, and it was a little more than a days work, if
you count shopping for the fabric, and sewing the hats, and the fact
that I must have sunk in about forty or fifty dollars in materials, but
still . . . eight hundred dollars! We raced back to my car, and I sat
down in the drivers seat and counted the money all over again. I
thought, I can do this every week. I did the math and grew rich in
my head. I kept the money in my lap as I pulled away, and I counted
it again. In fact, I was counting the money as I turned my first cor-
ner on the way home, and I was so distracted I rear-ended the guy

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right in front of me. Ended up costing about eight hundred dollars to

fix his car, so just like that the money was gone. I thought, Easy
come, easy go.

>> SAME STORY, DIFFERENT DECADE

Everything old is new again.

As I write this, in the summer of 2006, theres a
new storm brewing about the unwelcome attention
brought on a staid, status-oriented brand. Cristal,
the high-end champagne that had been the bubbly of
choice among rappers, which sells for as much as
$1,000 a bottle and had lately been featured in raps
and videos and episodes of MTVs Cribs, came out
and disassociated itself from the black community.
Youd think these guys might learn from each
others mistakes. For years, artists like Jay-Z, Snoop
Dogg, Notorious B.I.G., P. Diddy and 50 Cent had
been rapping about Cristal and pumping it up. It
flowed like water backstage, and in the hottest
clubs, and by all accounts had leapfrogged over its
competitors to become the industry standard. And
then all of a sudden the managing director of Cristal,
a racist idiot named Frederic Rouzaud, came out
and said he wasnt interested in sales to young
blacks. Apparently, our money isnt quite as green
as everybody elses, and he suggested all the shout-
outs for his brand might actually hurt sales long-
term, despite the recent bump.
I heard this and thought, Whats wrong with
these people? All you have to do is go into almost

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any club in almost any city and youll see Cristal

selling like crazy. Its like the Maybach Mercedes of
sparkling wineand priced accordingly. And yet
according to the great minds at Cristal, theres a
taint to our business, to where they could dismiss
our interest in their brand as a curiosity.
What can we do? this years idiot told The
Economist. We cant forbid people from buying it.
Im sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted
to have their business.
Yeah, Im sure they will, just as Im sure Frederic
Rouzaud and his ignorant colleagues will want to
forget the day they turned their backs on our
moneywhile me and my boys pop open a bottle of
Dom and toast our success.
Right away, Jay-Z put it out that he was boy-
cotting Cristal, and next thing you knew no one
from our community would touch the stuff. All of a
sudden, you had all these bottles, stacking up in
retail, and they just werent moving, to where theyd
soon have to be discounted. All the clubs started
pouring other brands. In just one day, a bottle of
Cristal on your table went from symbolizing pros-
perity, culture and accomplishment to representing
ignorance and supporting the racists of today.

I went out a couple more times to the Coliseum, hats in hand,

and tried to repeat the success of that first outing. I made a few mod-
ifications to my design, each time out. Sometimes I got close to that
first sell-through, sometimes I fell far short. Sometimes, it was freez-

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ing out there, and there was nothing in the way of foot traffic so no real
way for me to tap any real sales. But after a while I started seeing my
hats around town. Id see that little FUBU label and get all excited.
I decided to branch out into t-shirts. I had some designs made
upone with FUBU in a distinctive script; the other a stylin FB
logoand looked to silk screen them on shirts, hoping to make a little
money and to reinforce the brand. Remember, this was 1991, and
clothing companies were starting to put their names in big, bold let-
ters on almost everything they made. Its like it was no longer enough
to get the kids to buy the merchandise in the first place, but now they
had to do your advertising for you. So I bought into that, and hoped
like hell thered be some customers willing to buy into it right along
with me. I went back to that same screen printer Id used for those
first Rodney King t-shirts, same guy who did my labels for me, and I
discovered a place where I could get blank t-shirts for a dollar. They
were seconds, but they were nice enough. I even went out and
found three professionals in the embroidery business, Bob, Andrea
and Gary, and started embroidering our logos on these shirts, which
really made them stand out. No one was doing embroidery in those
days, so it was a good way to distinguish the brand.
I also bought my first ad around this timea full page in Right On!
magazine, which set me back about $3,000. (My mothers friend Larry
Grossberg helped us to negotiate that discounted rate.) A couple friends
went in on it with me, and we started getting calls from all over the
world. Japan, of all places. Id gotten a credit card machine, and I had to
pay a ridiculous fee in order to process a transaction, but I saw it as a
sign that I had arrived. And the orders came in. We were moving about
fifty hats a week, for a couple months, all on the back of this one ad.
Next, I took a booth at the Black Expo, at the Jacob Javits Center
in Manhattan. I thought Id kick things up a notch. The Black Expo was
like a large scale swap meet featuring all kinds of African-American
owned companies selling their stuff, or mainstream companies looking

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to reach into the African-American community. Soap companies, car

companies, insurance companies . . . Coca-Cola had a booth. AT&T had
a booth. These big companies used the Expo as a forum to launch new
products, while smaller companies looked to make their first splash on
the cheap. I used to go there as a consumer, and Id see all these cloth-
ing guys, selling product. The show before, there was a lot of Kinte
cloth on display, and I thought this stuff was about to pop in a big way.
The Expo was like a tricked out flea market, with a little bit of
everything. It really ran the gamut, so I bought a booth for a couple
hundred dollars. I had a friend spray-paint a back drop for me, and I
set it up behind a couple tables and called it a booth. A lot of these
established companies had really professional booths, all organized
and glamorous, but I was content with my bridge table and FUBU
backdrop. We might have looked like a band of amateurs, but hun-
dreds of kids came seeking us out, looking for our shirts.
The interesting thing about these first few batches of shirts was
that they were the only product we ever made that told our full story.
For us, by us. We had that printed on the back. We had FUBU on the
front, in a dictionary style, with the hyphen and the pronunciation and
everything. Just like an entry in Websters. And then on the back we
spelled it out, and thats the only time weve ever done that, on any
item issued by our company. Those five thousand or so shirts, from
those first few Black Expos, theyre the only ones that carried the
whole legend. And it got around. People knew what it meant. People
started to ask for us. Whatever wed done, wed done it right. We had
a hot line, the embroidered shirts especially. The tie-top hats eventually
faded away, that style didnt last, but I ordered a bunch of baseball caps
and started putting our logo on that, and those were pretty popular.
Whatever we were putting out there, people wanted in.

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I couldnt run this operation from the back of

my van forever. After those first couple sell-throughs at concerts and
marches and Black Expos, and after dipping my toe in the waters of
direct mail advertising, I realized I needed to get it together if I meant
to grow this business beyond a one-shot operation. I needed to
incorporate. I needed to trademark the FUBU name and logo. I
needed to find some way to streamline my efforts.
I registered the FUBU name, as a DBAdoing business as. That
was the cleanest way to play it, at that early stage. I dug deep and
paid for a lawyer, to dot all the is and cross all the ts. I developed a
business plana loose plan, to start, but it was a place to begin. I
also brought in my boys as partners. There was me, J, Carl, Keith and
one other guy. That one other guy, he came and went. We tried a few
different guys in that role. Whoever it was, he was like the fifth
Beatle. Hed work with us a while, lose interest and drop out. The
next guy would work with us a while, lose interest and drop out. It
was always someone with a short-term view. One week, it was

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some guy who wanted to be a rapper. Then it was some guy who
wanted to be an actor. Always, there was something better out
thereor so each one of these guys thought. It was just as well.
Who wants to hang around chickens when youre hoping to fly like
an eagle?
The four of us, though, we stuck with it. It was a sideline for each
of us, so we stuck with it as far as our schedules allowed. We made
it as much of a priority as we could. I kept my job at Red Lobster and
worked my FUBU business around my shifts. A couple weeks in
there, I dont think I had time to sleep. I thought, Ill sleep when Im
dead. The pipe dream was to open our own boutique, where we
could sell our own clothes and some other independent lines. That
was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and we were a long
way off. Short of that, we wanted to get our clothes in some local
stores, maybe even get a department store display. In the meantime,
we sold our shirts at every Black Expo in driving distance of New
York. Philadelphia, Washington DC, Boston. There was usually a
show every month or so. In between Expos, we continued to hit the
concert circuit and do some selling there, if we thought it made
sense. We got to be fairly well known. Anyway, our clothes got to be
well known. They had a certain style to them, a certain flavor. And the
concept behind our entire lineyoung guys from the neighborhood
putting out comfortable, affordable clothes for other young guys from
the neighborhoodseemed to hit with a lot of people. We put it out
there, and it caught on, to where people didnt mind handing over
twenty or thirty bucks to us for a nice t-shirt because it was like put-
ting money back into their own community, because we offered
something of value in return. Really, these were nice shirts, an easy
sell at an easy price point, and soon enough we had some of our boys
wearing them in the clubs, and that just reinforced the brand.
We did about six of these Expos in a stretch of two years, and
each time we brought more and more inventory. Each time, we tried

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to do a little something new, to push things in some new direction.

Different styles, different looks, different colors. And people came
looking for us. We couldnt keep our clothes in stock, thats how
much buzz there was attached to our product. Cant say for sure
where the buzz came from, those first couple shows, but it came.
We were too busy handling the mess of details getting ready for each
Expo. It took time to design and print the shirts, to carry the goods
back and forth from our suppliers, to make our booth look a little nicer
each time out.
Course, I know full well the buzz didnt happen all by itself.
Without really realizing it, we did what we could to help it along. We
didnt think of it as marketing or branding or advertising, didnt even
think of it as a strategy, but we kept pushing the line in every way
available to us. We wore our clothes ourselves, out at the clubs and
at concerts, so we became our own walking billboards. We got our
friends to wear our stuff, too, and since New York was the center of
our universe and the locus of hip-hop culture, a lot of our friends were
starting to make some noise of their own, so it worked out well for
us that as all eyes were starting to fix on them they were fixing on
our t-shirts at the same time.
At some point early on, we branched out into hockey jerseys,
which were just becoming hot. Chris Latimer, a well-known promoter
on the hip-hop scene who consulted for CCM, the biggest hockey jer-
sey company in North America, was getting all these rappers to wear
his jerseys, so I followed his lead and bought a bunch of blanks from
CCM. I told them I coached in a youth league, or some line of bull,
because they wouldnt sell it to me if they knew the intended use,
and they shipped me the blanks with the colors of the current NHL
teams. I worked with the color scheme on each jersey and added
some nice FUBU elements. Big block letters. Embroidery. Whatever
I could sprinkle on those jerseys to make them distinctive, something
a kid would want to wear for a night on the town.

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DISPLAY OF POWER

More and more, as I was putting myself out there and dealing
with manufacturers and shipping people and lawyers and designers
and whoever the hell I had to deal with to get FUBU off the ground,
I started to realize how important it was for me to be able to commu-
nicate with all types of people, from all kinds of backgrounds. Black,
white, Asian, Hispanic . . . you had to get along with everyone, espe-
cially in the garment industry. Gay and straight. Christian, Jewish and
Muslim. College-educated and high school dropouts. I knew as much
going in, and it was fairly obvious wed have to draw on talented
people from a variety of backgrounds, but it was something I had to
pay attention to just the same. I was working with people of every
conceivable stripe, from every conceivable station, and I was deter-
mined to do a decent job of it. The key was looking past those
stripes, and getting along.

>> TRUE COLORS

Wasnt always easy, being color blind. Wasnt

always easy, looking beyond our obvious differ-
ences to find common ground. Growing up, the
only white people I came into contact with were
authority figures. Cops. Teachers. Doctors. People
who were always talking down to me, in one way or
another. And without really realizing it we were
taught to take it, to have to shoulder all this disre-
gard and disrespect just because of the color of
our skin.
I wasnt raised that way, but it was the way of
the street. Hell, it was the way of the world. And
it came up, when we were getting the business
going. Absolutely, it came up. And whenever it did

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I was reminded of an exchange I had back in my

neighborhood with my mothers boyfriend Steve.
He had a good sense of people. He came into my
life when I was about twelve. And hes still an
important part of my life. He went with me one day
to the bike store, so I could pick up some parts for
this little bicycle repair business I had going, and he
started up some small talk with the owner. Me and
my boys were in that store all the time, and the
guy who ran the place was always nice enough, but
this was Steves first time. The bike store owner
heard where Steve was from and replied, Oh,
yeah, a white man can run free up there.
It was a tossed off comment, meant nothing to
me at twelve, but Steve heard it for what it was.
He knew right then this guy was cut from different
cloth. Didnt matter that Id been a good customer.
Didnt matter that this man had chosen to make
his living in a black community. Didnt matter that
Id thought he was cool, or that we were cool with
each other.
Right there, right in front of this guy, Steve
turned to me and said, Daymond, dont ever come
into this mans store again. He disrespects your
race. Hes making money off you and your friends
and he couldnt care less about you. There was no
anger in his voice, no rancorbut there was no
nonsense, either.
We marched out of there, and I never set foot
in that shop again, but Ive thought about that

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moment often. Ive thought about how I was so

easily fooled by this bigot passing for tolerant. Ive
thought about how important it is to give someone
the benefit of the doubt on these racial issues, but
to be keenly aware of what you get back in return.
Ive thought how sometimes a flash of prejudice
can take a real subtle form, and how its that first
flash that can blow up on you and do the most
damage.
And Ive thought about my mothers boyfriend
Steve, who happened to be white. Yeah, I know, I
forgot to mention that at the top of this piece,
but thats only because I forgot to notice . . . until
just now.

Around the time of our launch, the country started getting a little
smaller, in terms of music and reach and pop-cultural phenomenon.
We didnt plan on it, didnt anticipate it, didnt really notice while it
was happening, but thats what happened. Anyway, that was my
read. Throughout the 1980s, when rap was establishing a foothold on
the music scene, the main influences were mostly regional. You had
your East Coast rappers and your West Coast rappers, and a couple
groups in-between. You had artists like Run DMC and LL Cool J in
New York; NWA in Los Angeles; Luke in Miami; the Ghetto Boys
down in Texas, and on and on. Maybe four or five regions, all across
the country, setting the tone in terms of rap and hip-hop, and there
was very little crossover from one region to the next. Kids in New
York didnt listen to music out of L.A., not in any kind of big way,
although kids in L.A. had no choice but to listen to what was coming
out of New York, because truth be told thats where it was at. Kids in

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the heartland listened to some watered-down, politically correct ver-

sion of rap and hip-hop. But that all started to change, as FUBU came
of age. All of a sudden, artists were on a level playing field. DJs
started spinning their records, no matter where they were from, and
that opened up the country in a big way. Not just in music, but in
movies, in fashion, in business . . . across the board. Karl Kani was
being sold in Macys, just to give you an idea how mainstream we
were about to become. LL was developing a sitcom for CBS. And for
the first time the Top 40 pop charts were shot-through with rap and
hip-hop.
So that was the mood of the room, the mood of the country, and
it hit me that the way to tap into this new landscape was through tel-
evision. Wasnt such a genius idea at the time. I mean, big compa-
nies had been advertising on prime time network television for
decades, but we didnt have prime time network television kind of
money. Hell, we didnt have any money. Whatever we made went
straight to rent, or right back into materials for our next run. Or Id
spend it on gas and tolls and a new set of tires. The genius move, if
there was one, was to tap into our target market on the cheap
mainly, through music videos. It was like guerilla product placement,
the way these rap and hip-hop artists could start or validate a trend
simply by wearing a certain type of outfit or mentioning a brand in
one of their lyrics.
It was so obvious to me, the power of this new art formand
yet, for whatever reason, it didnt appear obvious to anybody else.
Werent a whole lot of people doing what we were doing, looking to
bust out on the back of the music business, and before I even real-
ized it we had kind of eased our way onto the video scene. Very
quickly, music videos had become our CNN, our Newsweek, our bul-
letins from the front. Music videos and BETthats how we stayed
in touch with each other, and on top of each new trend.
Back then, Ralph McDaniels was one of the most respected

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promoters of rap and hip-hop in our communitya real maven, in

every sense of the term. Hes still a force on local radio in New York,
but in the middle 1980s he was one of the first people playing rap and
hip-hop music videos in the city, back when MTV wouldnt touch this
type of music. He had a one-hour show every afternoon, and its
impossible to underestimate the influence of that one show. For the
first time, you could see young black people on television who
werent drug dealers or basketball players. It was a huge deal, to see
kids just like us, making it big, or about to make it big, on the back of
something positive like music. Everybody we knew watched Ralph
McDaniels, so I followed him down to some event in Virginia one
summer weekend, thinking I could give out some shirts and maybe
get some coverage on his show. It was a no-brainer, and I ended up
giving a bunch of shirts to Ralph McDaniels, and he ended up inter-
viewing me on his show. Hes a good guy, and we hit it off. That was
the first time any of us were interviewed on behalf of FUBU, and as
soon as that thing aired we started getting calls from stores all over
the city, wanting to carry our line. You could chart the cause-and-
effect. Trouble was, we werent set up to supply these stores in any
kind of big-time way. Some of them operated on a COD basis, and
that would kind of keep the FUBU engine running, but most of them
did business on consignment, which meant we suddenly had all this
inventory out there with no money coming back in. It was a real drain
on our cash flow. With the Expos and concerts and stuff, we were
used to selling through our line and plowing the profits back into the
next run, but here we were stretching ourselves pretty thin.
Ralph McDaniels had a lot of things going on. He was a true pro-
moter. He was into all kinds of fashion shows and events. He gave
many of todays artists their start, and hip-hop owes him a tremen-
dous debt. Mary J. Blige. Puff Daddy. LL Cool J. He was like the Ed
Sullivan of our world, always spotlighting these young performers,
trying to get them the attention they couldnt find on mainstream out-

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lets like MTV, attention he felt they deserved, and he took a liking to
us. He liked our clothes. He liked what we were about. He put us on
the map, really, at least in New York, and other than the small prob-
lem of trying to figure out how to keep ahead on these consignment
sales, we were really rolling.
Meanwhile, my boy Hype Williams started making a name for him-
self as a music video director (Ralph McDaniels gave him his start as
well), and I started going down to his sets with a bunch of shirts, hop-
ing to convince one of the artists or one of the dancers to wear them
in the shoot. I didnt think this all the way through, to what it might
mean for our business, but it was clear even to me that getting these
young artists to wear our clothes in their videos could only be a good
thing. I mean, putting one of my shirts on LL Cool J and seeing him
wear it onstage . . . that was thrill enough, one of the best feelings in
the world, and on top of that it created a huge demand for our clothes.

>> AMERICAN BRANDSTAND

Check this out: in the first-half of 2004, there

were a total of 62 songs that had spent time in
the Billboard Top 20 singles chart. Twenty-seven
of those songs, or 44 percent, contained at least
one branded reference, amounting to 645 branded
references in all, according to a report issued by
Agenda Inc., a San Francisco-based consulting
company. That works out to about ten references
per song. High-end brands like Cadillac, Hennessy,
Gucci and Rolls Royce are typically the most cited
by hip-hop artists, but mainstream brands like
Geico, Bank of America, Toys R Us and Avis also
make the cut. And in each and every case, these

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DISPLAY OF POWER

mentions correspond to a huge bump in revenues

for the companies involved.
For some reason, the trend seems to begin and
end in this one segment of the music industry.
Over the same period, the only non hip-hop song in
the Billboard Top 20 to contain a brand reference
was Jessica Simpsons With You, which talked
about her Levis. What this means is that rap and
hip-hop artists carry enormous weight with their
fans, and that our entire community is extremely
brand-conscious. Its all about what you wear, what
you drink, what you drive. Its not enough just to
sing about a car, like the Beach Boys used to do.
Its got to be a Cadillac or a Rolls or a Lexus.
Diamonds might be a girls best friend, like the old
song says, but these days its got to be a custom
design piece from Icelink or Jacob the Jeweler, or
something from Cartier or Rolex. We dont just
drink champagne, its Dom or Moet. Taken together,
these product mentions seem to validate an artist,
to signal that he or she has arrived, or to tele-
graph to their audience what theyre about. And
from the fans perspective, buying in to these
trends is a way for them to emulate the artists
who have become so important to their sense of
self and community.
Most mainstream companies have been slow to
appreciate the cause and effect. And some have
rejected the attention. But theres no denying that
something is going on here, and that this some-

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thing is all tied up with our shared notion of who we

are and how we live. Yeah, theres some shameless
name-dropping out there. (Think Petey Pablos
Freek-a-Leek: Now I got to give a shout out to
Seagrams gin/Cause Im drinkin it and they payin
me for it.) But most of it comes from a lifetime of
reaching up and out, and longing for the kind of
success these name-brands symbolize.

We had about ten high-end shirts we tried to keep in circulation

among these various artists, on video sets around the city. Wasnt
just Hype Williams. We also hit up Diane Martel and any other music
video director who would give us the time of day. You have to real-
ize, most of the video shoots back then were out in the open. They
were big deals, in our community. A lot of them were non-union jobs,
with a lot of our friends from the neighborhood working as part of the
crew. A lot of the artists were still on the way up, still living in the
same community, still plugged in to the same crowd. Most times, one
of us would know someone who knew someone who was involved.
It was like six-degrees-of-separation, only it wasnt even that far
removed. Usually, we were just once or twice removed from knowing
someone like Hype Williams, or someone else high up on the set of
each video, so there was always a way in. Wed find out where they
were shooting, talk our way onto the set, hand out a shirt, wait around
while they shot the video, take back the shirt, get it dry-cleaned, then
find another set where we could hand out the same shirt all over again.
In most cases, the artists and dancers were too happy to wear our
clothes, because they were hotand because we approached them
with genuine respect. We were fans, first and foremost, and if wed
gone after these artists like it was a business deal, we probably

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wouldnt have gotten anywhere. These days, most product placement

agents dont even know the artists names, but we knew the lyrics to
their songs. It meant something to us, you know.
We got a ton of publicity on the back of those first few shirts. The
very first set we cracked in this way was a video shoot for Punks
Jump Up to Get Beat Down, by the group Brand Nubian. Jeff and
Chaka set it up for us (theyre the managers behind Ludacriss suc-
cess), and that video ended up getting a ton of play, so we ended up
getting a ton of play. We also got one of our shirts into a Mariah Carey
video early on, with Old Dirty Bastard, and a video for Where I Want
to Be Boy, the second single for Miss Jones, which was about to
break big.
Typically, thered be about two months between the video shoot
and the time these videos would start to get some airplay, so it took
a while for us to see any results, and in the meantime we kept at it.
Hard. There was another video in there for a group called Bitches
With Attitude, another one of Hypes shoots. Sometimes wed hang
out at a set for ten, twelve hours and get nothing accomplished. I
remember one long day on the set of a Grand Puba video, and we
just couldnt get anyone to wear our clothes. Everybody was nice
enough about it, and nobody seemed to mind that we were hanging
around, but the look of our clothes didnt match up with the look of
the video and we went home empty-handedafter eighteen hours
of waiting around! That happened every once in a while, but we just
kept hustling and hustling, lending out these ten shirts and maybe a
couple hockey jerseys, and waiting for these videos to break.
Nowadays, this kind of stuff is often arranged beforehand, but in
the early days of rap and hip-hop videos everything was a lot looser,
a lot more casual. I even managed to jump into the shot myself, on a
Biggie Smalls video. If you blink you might miss me, but if you look
real fast you can catch me for half a second, popping in, wearing a
FUBU hat.

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When these videos started to break, our phone started to ring. In

a big, relentless way. We were still a long way off from opening our
own boutique, but a lot of small shops in and around New York City
wanted to carry our line. All of a sudden, FUBU became the hot
brand. There was a store called Montego Bay in Jamaica that was
one of the first to give us some space, and another store out in the
Green Acres Mall on Long Island. Our first prominent display at a
Manhattan boutique was at a store called Bees Knees, on Broadway,
across from the downtown Tower Records. There was another store
in the Bronx run by my boy Macho, and they also carried our clothes
early on; their security guard was a no-name rapper who weighed
just 170 pounds, who would go on to great fame (and great weight)
as Big Pun. And for some reason, there were three or four stores out
in Seattle, of all places, and another three or four in Japan, that
started to carry our line. A lot of people look back at our launch and
think we were made by these little stores in our black communities,
but thats not how it happened. That was part of it, no question, but
all kinds of people sparked to the FUBU line, and to the message
behind it. Surfers and skateboarders were big for us, in the begin-
ning, and we were happy to include everyone under our tent. Some
of these stores only ordered twenty pieces, and we still had to figure
out how to deal with the problem of consignment sales, but we fig-
ured it was worth the hassle. If they wanted to carry our clothes, we
could find a way to make it work.
Clearly, these music video product placements became the
cornerstone of our start-up operation. Already, wed seen an enor-
mous word-of-mouth type buzz through these Black Expos. People
knew about our clothes and came looking for us. But that was purely
regional. That was our grasp not quite exceeding our reach. These
videos, though, put us on a whole other level, a national level, so I did
a little quick research and came up with what I thought was an appro-
priate next move. I thought wed head out to Vegas, to the Mens

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Apparel Guild in California trade show, and try to make our first piece
of real noise. Its a key show in the apparel business, the MAGIC show,
and I knew we needed to be out there, that it was a logical next step,
but that was about all I knew. I didnt know you needed to sign up as
an exhibitor at least a couple weeks in advance in order to display your
product on the trade show floor. I didnt know that we needed to dress
for success and that our baggy jeans and loose t-shirts wouldnt quite
cut it alongside all these turned-out fashion industry types.
I didnt even know that the clothing business ran on credit, that
even if we wrote a whole bunch of orders all wed have was a whole
bunch of paper, promising payment on delivery. I might have known,
considering the few stops and starts wed had with some of those
boutiques that worked on consignment, but it still hit me like a giant
surprise. Wed still have to find a way to pay for the goods to hold up
our end of the deal, and on top of that wed still have to produce and
deliver all those garments, and at some point on that first trip out to
Vegas I caught myself thinking, Thats a lot of hoops to jump through
just to get paid.

>> GET THE BAGS, NORTON

Remember that old Honeymooners episode,

where Ralph gets it in his head that hes about to
be named in some old ladys will, and he and Norton
go to the lawyers office with an empty suitcase?
The old lady had a parrot named Fortune, and
every time the lawyer would read from the will
where it said, I bequeath my Fortune, Ralph would
nudge Norton and tell him to get the bags ready.
Well, that was me, out in Vegas, expecting to
catch a windfall of cash and to have to cart it back

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home to New York. I actually brought an extra suit-

case on that first trip out to Vegas, thinking Id
need it to cart home the money wed make writing
all those orders. Thats how I processed it. I just
assumed wed be rolling in cash. My partners
looked at me like I was plain crazy, and I guess I
was, but Id seen too many television shows to
know any better. Realize, its not a metaphor, for
me going out to Vegas with my hand out and my
hopes up; its the Gods honest truth; I checked an
extra bag, like I was some hapless hip-hop Ralph
Kramden. I meant to pack it with bundles of cash.
Like I said, I thought I was planning ahead. I thought
I had everything covered. I even thought things
through to where I imagined myself on the plane
ride home, carrying the suitcase with me to the
bathroom because I couldnt risk leaving it under
my seat or in one of the overhead bins.
I look back on that first trip and its almost
embarrassing, me with my empty suitcase and all,
but its also funny. And instructive. It helps to
remember that when youre just starting out youre
bound to make some mistakes. Youre bound to
get a thing or two wrong, a time or two. Its like a
rite of passage. Youve got to screw up a little in
order to get it right, and here we screwed up just
enough.

Its the oldest line in businessit takes money to make money

but money was tight back then. Real tight. My pockets were like rabbit

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ears. There were five of us out there on this trip. My mother still had
her job at American Airlines, so we were able to get out there for free,
long as we flew stand-by. Naturally, we couldnt all head out there at
once, because we couldnt count on there being enough stand-by
seats to go around, so we staggered our itineraries. My partner Carl,
he had a broken ankle, and it took him about 18 hours hanging at the
terminal at JFK, just to get on a plane, and it turned out none of us
were able to catch a flight directly to Vegas. We all flew to Los Angeles
instead, and drove the rest of the way in a cheap rental car, but these
were the resources available to us so we worked with what we had.
Once we got out to Vegas, we got ourselves a single hotel room
at the Mirage, about five miles from the convention center where the
MAGIC show was being held, and the accommodations were about as
tight as our budget: one of us slept in the bathtub, two of us slept on
the floor and the other two slept in the bed, head to toe. We quickly
realizedof coursethat our single hotel room would have to double
as our showroom. Again, something we might have known going in,
but we figured it out soon enough. We ran out to Home Depot, bought
a clothing rack, put it up against the window and called ourselves
designers. The room smelled like feet and fast food, and we only had
seven or eight garments so there wasnt a whole lot for the buyers to
look at once we got them up there (other than our own clothes, thrown
about the place, our underwear sunnyside-up on the floor)but, like I
said, we didnt have the paper to do this first show up right.

>> WHAT THE MAGIC SHOW

WOULD BECOME

That first MAGIC show, there were maybe one

or two black designers on the floor. Today, there
are a couple hundredand a lot of industry types

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credit FUBU for the shift. (Or maybe they blame us,
depending on their point of view.) Used to be your
garden-variety trade show, but we started upping
the ante each time out, and by now its been trans-
formed, in less than a decade. When we really took
off, we started building bigger and bigger booths.
We wanted people to wonder what wed do next, to
seek us out. One year, we put in a full basketball
courthardwood floors, fiberglass backboardsand
brought in people like Magic Johnson to sign auto-
graphs. We threw elaborate parties, at places like
the Rum Jungle, in Mandalay Bay. There were people
hanging from trapezes, 300 models brought in from
Los Angeles on chartered buses to help dress the
room up a bit, open bar, open everything.
It got to where MAGIC became known as much
for the party atmosphere as it was for apparel. It
was almost like Fight Night in Vegas. You had
people coming in to town just for the parties,
young African-Americans making the scene, people
who had nothing to do with the fashion industry.
Of course, now we tilt the other way. Now
theres no reason for us to stand out like that.
Now were like the old grandfathers out at MAGIC.
Now there are seven different parties every night,
and theres nothing special about them. Its over-
saturated, so we spend our money on other
things, but each time I head out there Im reminded
how far weve come, how much has changed since
that first trip.

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Turned out the buyers didnt care about that smelly hotel room,
or the five-mile haul from the convention center. Turned out there
was enough heat around our line to get us past these few glitches.
For all I know, our seat-of-the-pants outsider approach might have
made us more attractive as designers. Clearly, we were out of our
element, but that was the point of our entire line. It said as much
right there on our label and in our logo: FUBU. For us, by us. We were
a bunch of kids from Queens, taking our hustle out to Vegas to try to
sell our goods to the big boys, so it made sense that we were cut a
little differently. Our clothes were cut a little differentlyand for good
measure so were we.
Turned out, too, that we did a whole lot of things right. Wed got-
ten our t-shirts into enough music videos to create some vacuum,
and some name recognition. Wed been featured on Ralph
McDaniels show back in New York, and placed an ad or two in the
back pages of a couple magazines, so people were starting to know
what we were about. Wed even gotten fellow Hollis native LL Cool J
to wear our shirts and hats out in public, and to pose for a picture we
were able to use in some print advertising. This right here is a story.
LL had worn one of our red polar fleece jackets in this video he did
with Boys II Men, for a song called Hey Lover, and it got a ton of
play. I sewed the thing myself, in my house, and I convinced him to
wear it during the shoot. (Doesnt get more ground-floor than that!) I
used to drive for LLs manager, Brian, and do a little work for him as a
roadie. Once, I even drove home his dirty laundry to be cleaned. There
might have been another dozen or so kids doing the same kind of
thing, and most of them wanted to be rappers themselves, but I was
drawn to the power of it. The proximity to all that money and fame . . .
not to mention all those girls. And LL was cool about it. From when
he got his first record deal, he was cool, and now he had a television
show in the works, and he was starting to do movies, and he still
came back to the neighborhood to check out his grandmother and

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keep connected. He remembered me well enough, and on one of

these trips back home we got to talking. I told him what I was up to
with my line of clothes, and he put it in my head to go after every per-
son I could think of in the music business, from Russell Simmons on
down, and get them into some type of FUBU product. The line he
used (Ill never forget it) was that I should stalk them like a crazed
pregnant woman. Be relentless, he said. Dont take no for an answer.
Never let them breathe until they endorse you in some way.
So what did I do? I turned it back on LLbecause, when it came
down to it, he was the only person I really knew in the music business.
I followed his advice and stalked him like a crazed pregnant woman.
I learned from LLs new manager, Charles Fisher, that LL had to
catch a plane one afternoon, so I grabbed a pile of clothes and a
friend who knew how to work a camera and planted myself in front
of LLs house, I guess on the thinking that it would be pretty hard for
him to walk on by and not even stop to take a picture. Here again, I
didnt know the first thing about endorsement deals, and of course
it never occurred to me that if LL let himself be seen as a spokesper-
son for our little line of clothing hed ace himself out of any potential
deals with Levis or Tommy Hilfiger or any other designer that might
be in a position to actually pay him for the deal. We didnt have any
money, and LL knew we didnt have any money, and I didnt realize
it but I was putting him in a tough spot, hanging out in front of his
house like that. But I kept at it, and eventually I wore him down. He
had to come out to catch his plane at some point, and when he did
I pressed it on him like the crazed, relentless pregnant woman he
told me to be. Started slipping one of our shirts around his neck
before he could shoo me away. LL was understandably irritated, and
on serious edge, but then something clicked. He just shrugged,
finally, in a what the hell kind of way, and said, Alright, lets just take
the shot.
LL posed with the group of us, and if you looked closely you

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could see my gold grills, thats how much of a street guy I still was
at the time.
Anyway, my head nearly exploded, thats how much it meant,
him throwing in and posing for us. Then he said, If you ever get suc-
cessful, you better not forget this.
And I havent. Believe me, I havent. And I never will. He might
not see it the same way, but I will always be LLs biggest fan. For a
while in there, he was our biggest fan as well. He even wore one of
our hats in a GAP ad, and slipped in the phrase For us, by us, on the
low in his rhyme. The ad ran nationally for weeks before GAP exec-
utives figured out the not-so-subliminal message, and it became a
very famous example of guerilla marketing and a textbook case of
David taking on Goliath, using Goliaths multi-million dollar ad budget
without Goliath even knowing. Several heads from GAP and the
responsible ad agency started to roll, and they pulled the campaign.
However, it turned out that many African-Americans and hip-hop kids
were coming into their stores looking for FUBU, and they ended up
re-running those ads about a year later, because of the attention.
There are only a handful of artists like LL in this regardFat Joe (the
gatekeeper of the Latin market), Slim Thug, Bun B, Fabolous, Ja Rule,
Rick Ross and Jay-Zpeople who can go to the wall for you and your
product, because theyre not only artists, theyre businessmen.

>> DISPLAY OF POWER

Knowledge is power.
Leverage is power.
Insight is power.
In the end, it all comes down to power, only here
Im not just talking about the power to buy and sell,
or to hire and fire, or to beat on someone who

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does you dirt. After all, on some level, you start to

think power is a kind of given. We expect it. We
search for it in ourselves, and brace for it from our
colleagues and competitors.
But if power itself is a given, where do we find
our edge? These days, my take is that its the
display of power, above all. The appearance of
powerand knowing what to do with it. It took
that first trip to Vegas for this notion to register.
Specifically, it took pulling up at a stop light in a cab
driven by a guy who knew a thing or two about
power. Those Vegas cabbies, man . . . theyve seen
everything. I was heading over to the convention
center from my hotel. We pulled up alongside two
antique Chevy sports coupes. Different colors, but
the same model. One of the cars was being driven
by a little old lady, just as polite as could be. The
light turned green and you could see her ease gen-
tly back on the gas, but she was blocking traffic.
And this other car was being driven by this young
guy, looked to be about the same age as me, mid-
twenties, and he was just cutting it up. Fishing-
tailing, burning out, basically drag racing to each
stoplight.
We caught up to the same two cars at the next
light, and my philosophical cabbie turned back and
said, Look at that. Same two cars, but this one
here, hes gonna get a display of power ticket? He
pointed to the car being driven by the young guy.
I said, What?

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DISPLAY OF POWER

And the cabbie explained that this little old lady

didnt have the slightest idea of the power she was
sitting on, but this young kid was all full of adrena-
lin and ready to go. Same car, same engine, and
this ones just a beast.
Id never heard the phrase beforedisplay of
powerand thats when it hit me: two different
people, all outward appearances they might look the
same, but inside they just have no idea what theyre
capable of. Inside, theyve got the same ability to
turn it on and fire it up, but its how we turn it on
and fire it up that makes all the difference.
Ive thought back to this exchange about a mil-
lion times since that first Vegas trip, for the way it
crystallizes the ways we set ourselves apart. Weve
all got the same package, more or less. Were all
operating with the same machinery under the hood,
the same engines. But its what we do with those
engines that determine whether we succeed or fail.
Its how we strut that gives us our edge.

I ended up using that LL Cool J shot in a full-page ad in a maga-

zine called The Source, and I ended up using tear-sheets of that ad as
our promotional flier out in Vegas, and taken together it created the
impression that we were a happening young company with a
devoted followingnot to mention the resources to hire a hip-hop
icon like LL Cool J to endorse our line. Didnt really matter that we
didnt have a booth on the convention floor. We had the appearance
of a booth. We had the display of power and success. And so Id hand
out a flier and scrawl the name of our hotel and our room number on

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the back, and after a couple days wed dragged enough major buyers
through our tiny hotel room all the way across town from the trade
show to account for nearly $400,000 worth of orders.
Four hundred thousand dollars!
You have to realize, that kind of money was incomprehensible to
me at the time. Just off the charts, you know. And it wasnt just the
money that set me reeling; what it represented was just so far off the
map of my thinking that I couldnt begin to get my head around it. I
was thrilled at the response the whole time we were in Vegas, but
soon as I sat down on the plane headed home, I started to sweat. I
started to obsess about the material Id need to fill those orders. The
machines Id need to cut all those clothes. The workers Id need to
sew the product. The factory and warehouse space Id need to set to
work. And on and on. It got to where I looked around the cabin of that
plane and caught myself thinking, What am I into here? But then I
thought of my big, empty Honeymooners bag, stuffed into the over-
head compartment above my head, and I realized full well what had
gone on, what would happen next.
My suitcase may have still been empty, but we were finally in
businessand good to go.

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 SMOKE

I flew back to New York, on my stand-by pass,

and the main thought that kept bouncing around in my head was,
What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I doing? Whatthehellam-
Idoing, whatthehellamIdoing, whatthehell . . . ? Over and over and
over. I had $400,000 worth of orders, but it was all just a mess of
paper to me. Other than that, I had nothing. I couldnt think how to
tap into those orders and turn them into revenue, how to put money
in my pocket off the deal. How to make a business out of a hustle.
Maybe thats because we were up all night partying before leaving
Vegas, or maybe its because I was in just a little bit over my head,
but it was overwhelming to me, trying to figure how to fill all those
orderson time, at some type of profit. You might as well have
slapped a scalpel in my palm and told me to perform brain surgery.
I was freaking out, a little bit. Overwhelmed. It took more than
just money, even I knew that. It took knowledge and experience,
education and maturity, only here too we came up a little short. What
did I know about business? I worked at Red Lobster. I drove a livery

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 smoke

van. If I earned a dollar, twenty-five cents would go to gas, and twenty-

five cents would go to insurance. If I was going about it right, another
twenty-five cents would get set aside for repairs and maintenance. The
rest I could keep. But here I had to know about letters of credit, fac-
tors, giving terms to retailers, profit and loss statements, and like I said
we came up a little short. Actually, we came up short on every last
requirement or prerequisite except one, and here at last we had it cov-
ered: see, it also took balls to get a business like this off the ground,
and on this one count, at least, me and my boys were packing.
Even so, for the first time since I thought about making this FUBU
thing work, I started to think I was in over my head. I thought about
quitting, and just leaving those orders hanging. I was intimidated by
what lay ahead, and if somebody actually laid it out for me, what
would happen next, what Id have to go through to get to the next
phase, I probably would have give up right there. But then I remem-
bered a line I used to hear a lot: The only goals you never achieve are
the ones you never attempt. So I thought, Okay, D, time to start
attempting.
First order of business was to get some start-up money, so I
could buy materials and hire people and start filling those orders. Id
already maxed out my credit cards (thank God for Amex), and been
turned down for a loan at every banking and lending institution in the
city. Id jacked up my business plan and hit them all. Citibank,
Greenpoint Bank, Chase, the Bank of New York . . . I knocked on
every door. Still wasnt much of a business plan. It basically said,
Hey, give me x amount of dollars and if everything goes like were
hoping, Ill pay it back some day. It was one step removed from writ-
ing it all down on a napkin. And the response I received reflected
that. I was turned down 27 times. I counted it up one day when I was
feeling low, but the truth is I shouldnt have been surprised. I didnt
know the first thing about banking or financing. I didnt know the first
thing about writing an effective business plan. I didnt even know

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enough to wear a suit to these meetings. Nobody in their right mind

should have loaned me money.
But I couldnt take no for an answer. For me, the word no is
an absolute maybe.
Truth is, nobody should have loaned me money before the MAGIC
show out in Vegas, but $400,000 worth of orders changed everything.
All of a sudden, we were players. All of a sudden, we had something
to trade. Anyway, thats how it seemed to me, how it should have
gone, but it went another way. It went like this. The loan officer would
say, How much money do you actually have, Mr. John? Or, What
are your assets? And Id say, Actually, Im thirty thousand dollars in
debt. This wasnt what they wanted to hear, and I could tell this
wasnt what they wanted to hear, so Id usually add, But our clothes
are hot. To which theyd usually respond, Well, can we see some
of your samples? Aint got no samples, Id say, but LL Cool J
wears one of our shirts in his latest video. As if this might mean any-
thing to these people, because of course theyd never heard of LL
Cool J, so I would patiently explain that he was a popular rap artist, but
then nine times out of ten these guys would have never heard of rap
music either, so it was a little like trying to sell a bag of weed to a
priest. I was speaking a completely different language.

>> NEW MONEY

Most people were slow to recognize the pur-

chasing power of the black community. Specifically,
most mainstream white people were slow to rec-
ognize it, which is why none of these banker-types
could spot an opportunity here. The thinking was,
why reach out to a market that had never really
contributed to any bottom line?

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 smoke

Truth was, there was money to be made,

because all of a sudden there was money to be
spent, and if I was smart enough to write a halfway
decent business plan I might have shown how
FUBU could tap into that. Ill explain: early 80s or
so, you started to see a new stream of money flow
into our urban neighborhoods. It used to be that
the streets were run by older black gentlemen,
pimps and dope dealers and numbers runners. If
youd somehow managed to make it to middle age,
youd earned a place of respect, just by virtue of
the fact that you werent in jail or in the ground.
Now, though, there were other paths to success
for young black peoplelegitimate paths to suc-
cessand all these young guys had blown by their
elders, in all areas. Remember, we were the first
generation to grow up in the post civil rights era,
and the benefits of that struggle had filtered down.
Music, sports, education, business . . . there was
opportunity all around. Real opportunity.
Okay, so that was one factor. The other factor
was that there was also a new drug on the street,
crack cocaine, and it changed everything. Crack
wasnt the high-end cocaine being sold at clubs like
Studio 54. It was a cheap, five-dollar high, and it
turned our world upside downon the user end and
the dealer end, both. All of a sudden you had young
rappers hitting it big overnight, and superstar ath-
letes throwing their money around like it was noth-
ing at all, and underneath all of that were these

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DISPLAY OF POWER

young black kids getting easy-money rich selling

crack, parroting the culture of excess exhibited by
their favorite rappers and athletes, buying into the
same ideal. It all kind of fed into each other.
There was a real shift in the urban black commu-
nity, by the mid-80s, to where everything started
to skew young and aggressive and in-your-face.
Bling became the currency of choice. Young blacks
started to spend money like theyd never had any
before, like theyd never see this type of money
again. Wearing what you hustled on your wrist, or
around your neck . . . that became the way of the
street. No one thought about saving any money, or
investing, because no one expected to be around
long enough to spend through their bankroll. It was
easy-come, easy-go, and while you had it the thing
to do was let your money do your talking. Kanye
West talks about it in one of his songs, how we
quickly became the first group to buy our pride and
wear it on our sleeves, and he had it dead-on.
As a consumer group, African-Americans went
from having no disposable income to having only dis-
posable income in the time it took to check out a
new club, and in the shakeout there were start-up
companies like Walker Wear, Def Jam, Bad Boy,
Death Row, 40 Acres and a Mule, Karl Kani and now
FUBU, looking to make some noise on the back of
this cultural shift. Ten years earlier, we could never
have sold a refashioned hockey jersey for a hundred
bucksbut now that was only a place to start.

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 smoke

Turned out the way I had to play it was to take out a second mort-
gage on the house on Farmers Boulevard. Wasnt exactly the
smartest move in the world, but I was going on balls. I borrowed
another $100,000 against the house, and used it to buy ten industrial
sewing machines, and enough material to fill the first batch of orders.
Then I turned over about half the house and it made it into a factory.
My girlfriend at the time, she ended up being my wife and the
mother of my children, she went out and found a half-dozen or so
Latino women for me to sew the product. (None of them spoke any
English, but they were good workers.) The house had about 3,500
square feet, and the only spaces we didnt utilize for the business
were the attic, one of the bedrooms, the kitchen, and a little bit of the
basement. Every other square inch of space, we put to some kind of
FUBU use. I put a huge table in the dining room, and used it to cut
fabric. I met a guy named Greg, a real West Indian sewer, and he
knew how to cut patterns, so I put him in charge of cutting our gar-
ments. He parked himself in the dining room, and went to work on
that giant table. I made an office for me and my boys in one of the
rooms upstairs, and we all made it a point to be there whenever our
schedules allowed.
In all, those $400,000 worth of orders represented about 15,000
garments, so that was a ton of fabric and a ton of activity. Giant rolls
of fabric filled up the living room and the rest of the basement.
People were constantly coming and going. There were four or five of
us living there and another ten or so working there. We worked all
hours. There were deliveries all day. Some mornings, our dutiful band
of Latino sewers would report for work and have to bang on the door
for a while, or shout up at an open window before one of us could
get out of bed and open for business. In the winter theyd huddle out-
side my front door and shout, Frio! and Id look out the window
and see their red noses.
From the frantic, random way we ran the place, it might have

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been a sweatshop in lower Manhattan, and Im sure my neighbors

must have scratched their heads over all the noise. Some of them
were probably pretty pissed, because outside of me and my boys, it
was basically a quiet, residential neighborhood. We werent zoned for
any kind of commercial or industrial use, but we went at it like we
needed to in order to get the job done. And it was a nice-enough
neighborhood. Its not like there were all these burnt-out buildings
doubling as crack-houses. There were honest, hard-working people,
up and down the street. Families. And yet we basically ran that place
like a factory, at all hours, with little or no regard for our neighbors,
and after just a couple days our excess materials started to pile up
and we needed to figure out what to do with it. We didnt have the
money to get a dumpster and dispose of the stuff properly.
So I took the easy way out and burned it. Id seen all those bums,
burning tires to keep warm in the winter, so I thought we could do
the same, which was probably a fool move because we were burn-
ing polar fleece and other synthetic materials. Yeah, I know, it was
absolutely illegal, but that didnt stop us. We had a huge empty oil
drum set up in the back of the house, and thered be this toxic pur-
ple cloud hanging over the entire neighborhood. We werent exactly
inconspicuousIll say that. The fire department would come out to
the house every week, just about. Theyd kick down the door and
hose down the yard. Wed hear the sirens and take that as our signal
to hop the fence and run to the Chinese spot where wed stand out-
side drinking 40s for a couple hours until the trouble passed. Then
wed come back a couple hours later and thered be a ticket on the
front door. Its like we were still back in high school, retooling our hot
cars, looking over our shoulders to make sure we werent caught
and yet at the other end we were scrambling to fill orders for estab-
lished retail outlets, for businessmen who had a right to expect that
their goods were being manufactured by legitimate means.
We were working crazy, relentless hours, and the pressure we

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put on ourselves to meet these orders was also pretty crazy, but we
kept at it. Theres another line that kept bouncing around my head
around this time: Sacrifice is giving up something of lesser value for
something of greater value. Couldnt say for sure what that some-
thing of greater value would turn out to be, but we could certainly
give up our free time and our sanity for the next while and see what
it got us.
Our initial orders from that first MAGIC show called for four basic
items, in various sizes and quantities: a polar fleece sweat suit, pants
and top; a sweatshirt; and an embroidered scuba-type jacket, made
out of some neoprene-type material. Busta Rhymes ended up wear-
ing one of those scuba jackets in one of his first big videos, so it
became a hot item for us. In addition to those four items, there were
another six or so that we would buy as blanks and hook up with our
own logot-shirts, hats, that sort of thing. Wasnt much of a line
but hell, wasnt much of an operation, either. At least not yet.

>> LOOK THE PART

I spent a disproportionate amount of time

designing our first hang tag, because I thought the
look would say a lot about our line. A hang tag, Id
quickly learned, is the tag that hangs from a new
garment. (For a guy who didnt know a thing, I fig-
ured this one out pretty quick.) I wanted to do it up
right. With a new clothing line, a lot of times its
something simple like a hang tag, something that
doesnt have anything to do with the garment
itself, that stamps you and sets you apart. It could
be a logo, or an iconic image of some kind, or a
memorable slogan, like the Nothing comes between

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me and my Calvins line delivered so famously by

Brooke Shields, so many years earlier.
You never know what will catch on and make
some noise for you. Id admired the hang tags of
designers like Karl Kani, and I figured there must
be other idiots out there just like me who paid a
little too much attention to this type of thing, so I
put my energy into this one area. I used to catch
myself looking at Karl Kanis picture on his hang
tags before we even got FUBU up and going, and
Id think, Well, if he can do it, then so can I.
We already had the memorable sloganFor Us,
By Usso it made sense to cover as much ground
as possible, to reinforce the brand in every way avail-
able to us. I saw it as free follow-up advertising. Wed
make our sale, and the customer would take the
garment home, and thered be this great hang tag
laying around, leading them to their next purchase.
We had a nice shot taken of the four of usme,
Keith, J and Carland we looked like a bunch of
rappers from Queens. Rappers, thugs, whatever . . .
I thought it really sold what we were about, and
would help to make our brand identifiable in the
marketplace. Plus, it put a face to our linefour
faces, actuallywhich I thought couldnt hurt as we
were looking to establish ourselves. All these other
designers on their hang-tags, they were white, and
flamboyant, and vaguely European. I liked that we
all had a different look about us, a different atti-
tude. Keith was a little grimy. Carl was smooth. J

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was slick. And me, I was clean-cut. Together, we

had it covered, and in the back of my head I was
thinking that in success we could each become
associated with the FUBU brand. Thered be four
faces of FUBU, and we could spread ourselves
around, and wherever wed go, to different clubs,
to different concerts, someone could point to any
one of us and say, Hey, thats the FUBU guy!
So thats what we went with on the tag, and we
took a little heat for it in some circles. Its like we
were stars in our own right, the way the four of us
were posing on those tags, where in reality we
werent even stars in our own minds. We were still
scrambling to fill our first orders, still operating
out of my house on Farmers Boulevard, still work-
ing our other full-time jobs, still running like hell
whenever the cops or the fire department came to
the door because we knew were in violation of . . .
something. But we looked like designers, that was
the key. We looked like we cared about what we
were doing, what we were selling, what we were
hoping to build with this small piece of momentum,
and as we started to fill those first few orders and
hang these tags from our first official items, I real-
ized how important it was for us to look the part.
You know, to give the appearance that we were on
top of our game, that we knew what we were
doing. Perception becomes reality.
Appearance, I realized, is key, even in a small
detail such as this, because we went from being a

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bunch of guys working tirelessly behind the scenes

to get their clothing line off the ground, to a bunch
of guys out in front, representing. I didnt plan on
it, but it turned out our customers would buy a
shirt and feel like they had helped us out, like they
had done us some sort of solid. Turned out, too,
that this wasnt such a bad way to build a brand
and some all-important customer loyalty.

The garbage was a real concern. There was a lot of excess fabric.
Once we figured out what we were doing, wed learn to cut the fab-
ric in such a way that wed minimize the excess, but back then there
was a lot of waste. Also, wed get a lot of our shipments from over-
seas in big wooden crates, or the fabric would be wound around
these enormous heavy-cardboard poles, and those would all be lying
around, cluttering up the house and the yard. The garage was
jammed with all the furniture and carpets we had to take from the
house, but there was a ton of stuff we couldnt fit in there. My
mother was a real pack rat. She grew up poor, so she couldnt throw
anything away. Plus, my father had built the house, and all his build-
ing materials were still there. Nails, plastic, fiberglass, BX cable . . .
and I had to get rid of it all to make room for our operation.
It all piled up to where I used to spend a couple hours each night
in the yard out back, burning everything, and I spent so much time
facing that big oil drum, with those big, roaring flames, I turned about
four shades blacker on one side of my body. If Id known you could
get a fireburn like that, standing so close to the flames, I would have
turned around every once in a while, gotten an even tan. My hair
started falling out a little bit on that one side, and my skin was con-
stantly hot. The occupational hazard to end all occupational hazards.

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Even the grass in the backyard started to develop these little burnt-
out circles, from wherever the drum would be, so from on high it
looked like these weird urban crop patterns left by some UFO.
Some nights, wed make it a party. My neighbors would look out
the window and see four or five young black guys with their shirts
off, standing around a burning oil drum, drinking 40-ounce bottles of
beer. Once in a while, someone would yell down to us to keep it
quiet, and wed say, Get back in your house, old lady, or whatever.
These poor peoplewe were their worst nightmare. They were liv-
ing in hell. I feel bad for them now, I really do, but back then I was
too arrogant and focused to give them a thought. We had our own
crap we had to slog through, same as them.
And the thing of it is, we had no idea if this clothing line would
actually work. It felt like our ticket up and out, but you never know.
The four of us were at it so hard, in such close quarters, sleeping
maybe three hours a night, that at least one of us talked about quit-
ting every week or so. There was tension and stress and occasional
fist fights when our tempers ran away from us. But at the end of
each day we were brothers, fighting the good fight, in on the same
deal. Yeah, it was just a bet, but we all felt it was a good bet. We
were still making our money on the come, running around like crazy,
trying to fill these first orders, making some of the local deliveries
ourselves to cut down on shipping costs, grabbing a couple hours
sleep here and there. Its like we were all living in a strange bubble,
underneath that strange purple cloud hovering over my house. We
worked our day jobs, we worked our FUBU sideline, we networked
at clubs and parties and music video sets . . . and we waited to hit it
big. We counted on it.
The trick came in seeing it coming. In those days, we still had a
little black and white television in the house, no cable, and I had it set
up in the kitchen. One of those rabbit-eared sets, with the tin foil on
the antenna. Wed see one of our videos come on Ralph McDaniels

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show and get all excited. First couple times it happened, we were
jumping all around, clapping each other on the back, just out of our
minds. Then we got used to it, but it never completely lost that little
thrill. I still get amped every time I see one of my garments on a rap
artist or celebrity. I get an even bigger charge when I see someone
wearing one of our shirts out on the street or in a club, because that
to me is just about the ultimate validation of what we do. But those
first few times, seeing one of our hockey jerseys or jackets or t-shirts
in a video . . . that was big-time, and we just hoped like hell the second-
mortgage money held out long enough for us to fill all our orders.

>> 05

Wasnt long before every company on the planet

began to target music videos as a promotional
tool. Im surprised it took that long, but by the
butt-end of 1995, front-end of 1996, after we had
about a six-month running start, MTV began blur-
ring the logos and images on videos that seemed to
be a little too strategically placed on and around the
artists who appeared in their featured videos. I
guess their thinking was, if Pepsi or Ralph Lauren
or Mercedes-Benz was going to advertise on their
network, they were going to pay for it, which meant
that even if we convinced an artist to wear our
clothes the FUBU logo would be scrambled.
Still, a music video in heavy rotation on MTV
was worth millions, in terms of product placement
and brand recognition. All those repeat plays . . .
it was like buying a 30-second spot on the Super
Bowl. No way was I gonna let those suits at MTV

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close this little backdoor on me without some kind

of fight. I knew there had to be a way around the
MTV censorstheres always a way!and I came
up with a new logo that I thought would be scram-
ble-proof and at the same time signal our brand. I
stole the idea from a lot of clothing companies, like
Abercrombie & Fitch and Polo, which used the year
of their launch in a lot of their designs, and Nike,
which used Michael Jordans uniform number, 23,
as a kind of brand, only in our case I wasnt out to
celebrate any anniversary or sports icon. I was out
to celebrate me and my partners, and since there
were five of us (me, Keith, Carl, J and that fifth
Beatle), I hit on the number 05. For a while in
there, we put that number on everything. Shirts,
jackets, hockey jerseys, hats . . . To most people,
it just looked like a number on a team uniform, but
of course no athlete wore a 0 in front of the 5.
He just wore number 5, so we were somewhat
unique. Plus, we were still a couple years from
Y2K, so the year 05 wasnt even on peoples
radar, let alone embroidered on their clothes,
which meant we had that number pretty much to
ourselves. (And, thinking like my boy Prince, I knew
that if FUBU made it to 2005 thered be a nice
pay-off, in brand-awareness terms.)
We put that 05 on almost every item we made,
for a time, and after a while people began to asso-
ciate it with the FUBU line. We didnt have to spell
it out for everyone; people just knew, same way

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they knew what our name stood for, even though

wed never spelled that out for people after that
first run of shirts. We even went out and regis-
tered the number for this type of use, and a cou-
ple years later we won a $6 million lawsuit against
another company that tried to infringe on our
trademark.
The point, though, is not that it pays to CYA
with lawyers and trademarks (although it certainly
helps), but to keep thinking outside the box, and
recognizing that the box keeps moving, and chang-
ing shape. Music videos had been our way in to this
market, and very quickly the rules of the game
changed on us so we had to shift gears. Not a
whole lot, but just enough to stay out in front. Busta
Rhymes wearing one of our scuba jackets was price-
lessbut priceless could shoot to worthless in no
time at all if our logo was blurred and people at home
couldnt make the FUBU connection. The 05 was
the FUBU connection. It symbolized the four of us in
on this pipedream, and it left room for that fifth
open spot, for the partner who never managed to
stick. And it kept us in the game.

At some point, in the middle of all this craziness and excitement

and busting-our-asses, my mother pulled me aside and told me I was
out of my mind. I think those might have been her exact words. She
didnt like to interfere, but she pressed it. Told me I was an idiot for
trying to finance this thing myself. I tried to explain that the banks
wanted no part of our business, but she wasnt hearing it. She said,

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Daymond, youve got to use other peoples money. Thats the only
way to make it in this world. She felt so strongly about it, she took
out a classified ad in the Sunday New York Times, without even
telling me. The ad said something like, One million dollars in orders,
need financing. And we got a couple dozen calls on it. By the next
day, a Monday, our answering machine was full. About half the calls
were vague inquiries, from people wanting to know a little bit more
about our situation, what kind of business we were in, what the
orders represented, that sort of thing. Another ten were from mob-
sters and loan-shark types, guys with names like Sal, Vinnie or
Bareback Louie wanting to shake me down, offering outrageous
terms, like fifty percent. One or two of them wanted pictures of my
family to secure the deal, so there was no way I was doing business
with these characters.
But three or four of the calls were from legitimate garmentos,
fashion industry executives on the prowl for a good investment
opportunity, so I set up some meetings. Id take my mother, and I
realize now what a strange picture I must have made, this street kid
from Hollis, taking his mother with him to a straight-up business
meeting. But my mother knew her stuff. These guys would look at
me like I was some mamas boy, but I didnt care. Dee and Wah of
Ruff Ryders used to bring their pops with them to meetings, and he
was a respected guy and nobody gave them any grief for it. This was
my version of the same thing. My mother had my back; she was my
dog. She knew what questions to ask, what questions wed need to
take back to our lawyer after each meeting. And she was a good
judge of people.
In one of those meetings, we sat down with Norman Weisfeld,
from Samsungs textile division, and his brother Bruce, who was run-
ning the family business, who would go on to become my partners and
good friends. We didnt get off to the best start, though. I met with
them at their offices in the Empire State Building, and they seemed

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interested in doing a deal with us. Their main business was bubble
coats, which mean things were slow six months out of the year, when
the rest of the business was selling summer. They were looking to
expand. Unfortunately, me and my posse didnt make the strongest
first impression, and for years these guys would razz me about being
the asshole who brought his mother with him to do a deal, but it didnt
bother me. They were right. It must have been pretty funny, to sit
across the table from me and my mother, but that was my comfort
zone. I liked having her at my side, and I was smart enough to recog-
nize that sometimes its the people closest to you who have the most
to offer, in terms of wisdom and insight and experience.
First time we met, a couple months after that first MAGIC show,
Norman and Samsung were also looking to do a distribution deal
with another designer named Benny MilesSir Benny Miles, actu-
ally. Thats what he called himself. I somehow found out that Sir
Benny himself was sitting in the next room, while I was meeting
with Norman and Bruce, and I took it as a giant show of disrespect.
I mean, I could certainly understand Bennys right to pursue the
same kind of deal we were after. And I could understand that these
guys might have been talking to any number of young designers,
and that they would probably wind up only doing one of these deals,
but to play one designer off the other, with one tucked away in a
back room like that . . . it set me off.
To Bennys credit, he knew how to sew. Technically, he could
design me and my partners under the table. He could do a suit. He
could do a bubble coat. He could do a pair of pants. Put him in a
room for a half-hour and hed come out with the best-looking coat
youd ever want to see. He was super-talented. But the world is full
of talented people who are technically proficient but lack the drive or
the instincts or the contacts to make a meaningful impact. Benny
didnt have $400,000 worth of orders, or access to artists like Mariah
Carey and Busta Rhymes. He couldnt get LL Cool J to wear his

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product, or get his clothes into the clubs. He couldnt connect the
power of music with the power of persuasion, the power to remind
people of times, places, smells, colors, styles, and the fact that
music packs such an emotional charge that if you find a way to con-
nect it to the consumer market youll be so far ahead of your com-
petitors they couldnt even find you with a map. Its the soundtrack
to our lives, and we had a bead on it that guys like Sir Benny couldnt
match. So, clearly, we brought different things to the table, and
Norman and Bruce and them had to decide whether they wanted
someone with pure, technical skills, or these four, raw street guys
who were somehow plugged in to the Rap and Hip-Hop community.
It was a tough call, even I could see that, but I didnt like that they
had Benny in the other room while we had our meeting. That, to me,
was a deal-breakerif there was even a deal to be made. There
werent any terms on the table just yet, but I was ready to walk over
something like this. Fortunately, though, I kept my cool, and I kept
my mouth shut. My mother kept telling me we would never get the
best deal based on what I would ask for, but on what I could nego-
tiate. That basically meant I had to sit back and seethe until these
guys made an offer. Then I could toss it back to them and lay out my
own terms.
Meanwhile, they kept stringing Benny along, and they kept
stringing us along, and for all I knew they were stringing a couple
other designers along as well. They even had Benny doing some
work for them, on some kind of retainer, while we kept scrambling
to fill our orders. Like I said, some stores were paying us C.O.D., but
some were taking 90 days to make payment, so our second-mortgage
money was depleting. There was some money coming in, but not
enough to keep ahead of the money going out, and I was too stupid
to realize that we were desperate to do a deal. We needed Norman
and Bruce, but I didnt know that.
Finally, Norman called with an offer: they would cover all our

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costs and front us the money wed need to develop our line, in
exchange for two-thirds of our business. Ive since learned that this
was pretty much the standard deal in the garment industry, for a
backer looking to come in and handle the financing and the distribu-
tion, but all I cared about was that wed be covered. Thered be nice
salaries for me and my boys. Nice offices. We could leave our other
jobs and throw in full-time on this FUBU push. Wed be set.

>> NEGOTIATING FROM IGNORANCE

Heres a business strategy you wont find any-

where else: approach every deal like you dont have
a clue or a care in the world. Come to every nego-
tiating table uninformed and unprepared. Treat
every deal point as an affront. Be prepared to walk
over the smallest thing.
Look, the conventional wisdom is youre sup-
posed to negotiate from strength. Thats where
you find your best deal. But our strength at FUBU
was also our weakness. We were street-wise, with
a hard-won street ethic that pretty much flew in the
face of most boardroom exchanges. We were raw
and unsophisticated. I didnt know the first thing
about how to handle myself in a bona-fide business
negotiation. I wasnt patient or subtle or charming.
And yet in my case ignorance was bliss,
because if Id known half of what I needed to know
in order to get FUBU off the ground, I wouldnt
have even bothered trying. If Id seen all the hur-
dles, Id have looked elsewhere. And if I had any
sort of poise or polish to me I wouldnt have been

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the arrogant guy who attracted potential investors

to our business in the first place. Yeah, we were
the hottest line out there, by the time we got to
Norman and Bruce Weisfeld. Yeah, we had all these
orders, and the promise of a lot more. Yeah, there
was more buzz around us than youd find in a honey
factory. But we were almost down to our last
dollar. We had no real business sense, no formal
schooling. And we had no business not accepting a
standard distribution deal like the one being
offered.

The Las Vegas MAGIC show was a twice-yearly event, and there
was another one coming around on the calendar, but I couldnt get
Norman on the phone to accept his deal. I kept calling and calling.
Meanwhile, I had no real idea what was happening on the other side
of the table. Turned out Norman and Bruce had been having a diffi-
cult time making a go of it. Business was tough. Their father had
started the family business. He was a Holocaust survivor. He always
instilled in them to keep the doors open, no matter what. He used to
talk about how you never knew who was going to walk through those
doors. Their father was an extremely strong man. I guess youd have
to be, to survive the Holocaust. And Bruce religiously kept that phi-
losophy, so they were just hanging in there, trying to get something
going. If their father knew they were keeping the doors open so that
four black kids from Queens could walk through it, he might have
thrown up his hands and shouted Oy vey! But to their great credit,
thats just what they were doing, only they werent doing it fast
enough for us to take advantage of the upcoming MAGIC show.
Without a deal, then, I figured we could head out to Vegas and

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find another investor, on the back of all the heat that was still
attached to our line. And so, next thing we knew me and my boys
were again out in Vegas, again on our American Airlines passes, again
on the cheap. We didnt even bother to bring out a new line to sell,
because we still had that mess of orders to fill. If we took in any more
business, it might have derailed the whole operation. Our agenda this
time out was to scare up some other potential investors, so we
walked the floor of that convention center in our FUBU threads, hop-
ing to attract some attention. And, sure enough, we did. Wasnt the
kind of attention we were aftermeaning, no one came forward and
offered us a dealbut people noticed us, thats for sure. We handed
out the same tear sheets we used that first MAGIC show, the ones
with LL Cool J. I remember walking by the Lugz booth, where a
buyer from Dr. Jays was hanging with about 25 other retailers, and
the guy hollered out at us and said, Man, you guys have got the
hottest line on the street, period. Where can I find you?
It was good to hear, and it just so happened that Norman and
Bruce had a booth right next to Lugz. Bruce overheard everything. I
couldnt have set the whole thing up any sweeter. So that put the
whole thing in motion all over again. Bruce got on the phone to
Norman right away and said, Whatever happened to that FUBU
deal? These guys are hot as hell. We better do this deal. Now.
It was just a chance comment that Bruce Weisfeld happened to
overhear, but I have to think it would have gotten back to him and
his brother one way or another. We were definitely in play, and the
center of some serious attention. We were like a shared secret, and
everybody wants in on a secret, right? Plus, its a relatively small
business. Everyone knows everyone else. And every season, it
seems, theres a new line that comes out of the MAGIC show with
all the excitement and attention, and even though we werent
exhibitors we were the flavor of the moment. Somehow or other,
we would have come once again to Norman and Bruces attention,

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and they would be reminded of the deal that seemed to have gotten
away from them.
Norman called, soon as I got back to New York, but I wouldnt take
his first call. Wouldnt take his second or third calls, either. I was still
a little rough around the edges, still a little unsure how this pride and
respect thing might play in big-time Corporate America, but I didnt
like the way this guy treated me that first time around. Yeah, he made
us a fair offer, but I didnt like that hed left us hanging, all that time.
He didnt return my phone calls, so I wouldnt return his, and when he
did finally get me on the line I told him he was full of it.
What do you mean? he said. I want to do a deal.
I told him again that he was full of it. Then I think I hung up on
him. I was nasty as hell, and to this day Im not sure why. It was just
business, at that point, and looking back Norman hadnt really done
anything but keep his options open and refuse to give away the store,
but for some reason I took it personal. For some reason it felt like he
kept me dangling, on that first pass. And its not like I had any other
deals to fall back on. We did turn up a couple other would-be
investors on that trip out to Vegas for our second MAGIC show, but
I didnt like those deals either, so we were no closer to any kind of
long-term solution.
The thing of it is, I didnt think I needed to do a deal with anyone
at that point. I thought I was rich. I was filling my orders, and I had
every reason to believe thered be more orders on the back of that
first batch. Our shirts and jackets were in heavy rotation in various
music videos. We were hot, whatever that meant. But I was too
dumb to look even just a couple months into the future and make a
realistic assessment of our prospects. Truth was, in two more
months, I would have been bankrupt. Four months, I probably would
have had to sell the house.
But Norman was persistent. He kept after me, and he wore me
down, and this time he came back with an even better deal, probably

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better than one I could have negotiated for myself. Me and my boys
got to keep FUBU for ourselves. At Normans suggestion, we would
keep full control and ownership of our brand and our trademark. He
wasnt just being generous. He was smart enough to realize that this
type of set-up would carry enormous benefits in the black commu-
nity, where being black-owned and operated can really distinguish
your brand. It would be good for us, good for businessand, ulti-
mately, good for Norman and Bruce. So thats the way we played it,
and then on top of FUBU we formed a holding company, which we
split down the middle, and we slotted FUBU into that, so at the end
of the day I could look myself in the mirror and know wed taken care
of business. Our business.
Norman had this one right. Absolutely, in the black community its
a great big deal to be able to point to a black company and know that
its genuinely black-owned. Its like a street version of the Good
Housekeeping seal of approval. It means you can be trusted, and sup-
ported, and pointed to with pride. It means youre authentic. Yeah, in
one respect we were partnering up with these nice Jewish boys
from Samsung, fifty-fifty, but if they ever failed to hold up their end
of the deal wed still own FUBU outright. Wed still be the public face
of our company. Wed still keep true to ourselves, and to the credo
behind our name: for us, by us.

>> YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK-OWNED

Along with that shift in the purchasing power of

the black community came a sense or responsibil-
ity to keep that money within the black community,
wherever possible. The line you started to hear was,
Yeah, youre making all this money, but youre
spending it with the white man. And underneath

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that line was the caution that we had to take care

of our own, and an unspoken pressure on each of
us to do our part.
Lets face it, in a city like New York, we didnt
have to look far to see examples of other minority
groups taking care to fuel their own community.
The Chinese did a great job of re-circulating their
money, buying Chinese goods and services, from
Chinese merchants. The Italians, in neighborhoods
like Little Italy, were able to do the same. But in the
black community, it was unusual to find a sense of
supporting each other, of a rising tide lifting all
boatsin part because there had only been a small
community of black business leaders and manufac-
turers in need of our support.
In my own household, growing up, this had
never been an issue. My mother would go to the
white neighborhoods to buy better cuts of meat
from the white butcher. Id go to Macys to buy
Polo, or Louis Vuitton, or Timberlands . . . what-
ever was hot. You know, there werent a whole lot
of black merchants to begin with, but what few
there were, we took the attitude, If we get to
them, we get to them.
And yet that all started to change, around the
time of the Rodney King riots, around the time all
this new money started to flow into our commu-
nity. The new thinking seemed to be, now that the
money had finally found us, wed do well to keep it
near. To be black-owned became a point of honor,

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the same way mainstream Americans once pointed

with national pride to clothes or cars or computers
that were Made in the U.S.A. To spend your
money at a black-owned business was doing your
part. It was almost expected. It became such a big
deal in the black community during the rioting that
Chinese and Latino merchants would spray-paint
the words black-owned on their windows, hoping
the thugs and vandals would do the right thing and
pass them by.
It was the kind of thinking that laid the founda-
tion for FUBU, and it was one of our principal
assetsour calling card. And I wasnt about to
trade it for the world.

It was a good deal all around. We got our pay-day, and a little bit
of breathing room in filling these pending orders, and a show of
respect we took as key. And the Weisfelds, with Samsungs backing,
got a partnership with a hot brand and access to our various con-
tacts in the rap and hip-hop communities. We went to work right
away. The very next day, after we signed the papers, we started
going to our new offices in the Empire State Building and ramping
down our factory operation in the house on Farmers Boulevard.
Wasnt exactly room for all of us in those offices, but we fit ourselves
inI guess on the thinking that wed better make ourselves at home
before Norman and Bruce and them could change their minds.
There was about a three-month turnaround, as we moved our
manufacturing to the Samsung side, and as we helped transition our
new partners from an outerwear company to a sportswear company.
Their family business had been bubble coats, and thats what they

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knew; they needed to learn how to make jeans and t-shirts and
sweatshirts; they needed to understand our market. One of our first
priorities was to get ourselves in line with the seasons, meaning that
we started shipping our heavier winter goods early, so that theyd be
in stores for the winter selling season, instead of whenever the hell
we got around to filling the order, which is how wed been going
about our business. That kind of half-assed approach was fine, for a
rag-tag bunch of upstarts from the hood, and we could have proba-
bly gotten away with it for another season or two, but it was time to
get our act together and plan for some kind of future. Our future.
Wed do it up right, or not at all.

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Empire State Building, 48th floor. Thats where

we landed. On one level, it might have felt like wed arrived, but I
dont think we looked on it as hitting the big time just yet. I guess you
could say we were like King Konga big beast climbing its way to
the observation deck, scaring the natives in our path, but we still had
a way to go. There was a lot of work ahead of us, a lot that had to fall
our way, and wed all seen our boys from the neighborhood flame
through more money than we were making in a single drug deal.
Anyway, if this wasnt the big time it was close. We were riding
the elevators each day in a serious landmark building, with people in
serious suits out to make some serious cash. And guess what? We
were holding our heads high and holding our own. With our salaries
we were making enough to bounce from Farmers Boulevard and into
places of our ownnot right away, mind you, but we each had a foot
out the door when we signed the distribution deal. I drew an initial
salary of about $50,000. Carl and J drew slightly less. Keith didnt
sign on just yethe was still working in building management, still

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not sure we could make a go on this FUBU dealbut we kept on him

about making a decision, and it took a couple weeks until he eventu-
ally threw in, and at that point we were finally good to go.
The primary obligation to Samsung was to keep doing what we
were doingand to ship at least $5 million worth of product in the
first three years or the deal was off. Dont know how we came up
with that number or that timetable, but it seemed like a reachable
goal, given the orders we managed to book on that one Vegas trip
and the ones that trickled in through our limited advertising. Turned
out it took only four or five months to meet our target, and I look back
now and think it had to do with the vision we had for our clothes. We
struck a kind of chord. Yeah, the high-profile push we continued to
get from rap and hip-hop artists kept us out in front and in the mix,
but it was more than that. And it was more than the simple fact that
we wanted to make our own clothes and call our own shots. It was
that we had a clear concept in mind, and that no other company was
taking the same approach. We knew what we liked to wear, how
hard it was to find, and how much we could justify spending. We
werent out to reinvent the wheel, but we were hoping to spin it in a
fresh new way.

>> DRESS FOR SUCCESS

Before FUBU, we were buying Carhartt and

Timberland and North Facetechnical, performance-
based gear. No good reason except we liked the
way the stuff looked. No question, it was overkill,
far as we were concerned. It was like wearing
top-of-the-line scuba gear to wade in a kiddie
pool. I mean, Carhartt makes clothes for con-
struction workers, using flame-resistant fabrics,

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and Timberland makes rugged outdoor gear, filled

with Gor-Tex and fiberglass and all that . . . and we
only bought it for the design. We didnt need to
spend $800 on a ski jacket. We didnt care if it
kept us warm in sub-zero temperatures, or if it
had pockets for our ski goggles. We just wanted to
wear this stuff while we stroked the streets of our
neighborhood.
Thats the mindset we took to our first line. We
could cut out all these bells and whistles and per-
formance elements and retail a nice coat for three
hundred dollars, which opened up a whole new
market. The design was still there, but wed take
out the technical stuff and focus on the stuff the
hood cared about. Our bells and whistles were
stash pocketsbecause, hey, you could never have
enough places to stow your cell, or your condoms,
or your weed.
Style, comfort, affordability . . . thats what we
looked for in our designs. We also looked at what
some of our counterparts were doing and tried to
play off of that. If Nike came out with a Carolina
blue sneaker with a burnt orange swoosh, for
example, wed make a Carolina blue shirt with a
burnt orange FB on it. We were big into footwear,
me and my boys, so we tried to get a little ensem-
ble thing going in that area, to make sure our cus-
tomers didnt have to go to Nike or Adidas or
some other company to coordinate their look with
their sneakers. They could come to us.

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Quality was key. If you bought one of our sweat-

shirts, it would be made from the heaviest mate-
rial we could find. It would be embroidered, not
screen-printed, and the appliqu would be as thick
as possible. The zippers would have some weight
and last to them. The garment wouldnt shrink. It
wouldnt nap up. Nice. And the dyes we used would
be as wet as we could manage without running,
because thats what gave you those rich, vibrant
colors. You know, a lot of the sweatshirts and t-
shirts that were out at the time used to have a dis-
tressed or faded look to them. That was a certain
style. But in urban fashion, you wanted your
clothes to look as new and fresh as possible. You
wanted those colors to pop, and really announce
who you were and what you were about. That
faded, raggedy look was for rich white kids looking
to dress down in their worn-out designer clothes.
We rolled another way.

The big trend in urban fashion in the mid 90s was towards clothes
that were a little bigger and baggier than a traditional fit. That was the
style, and we were out in front of it. Those form-fitting Levis jeans,
the muscle tees, the tailored sports coats, the collared shirts . . . that
wasnt our market. That wasnt what our clothes were about. We
were a little looser, a little more all over the place, a little more casual.
And we reflected what was going on in the clubs, in the streets of
our communities. It happened in a blink, which is about the time it
now takes for every seismic change on the cultural scene; and in the
clothing business, we quickly realized, if you wait for that blink you

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might miss something; whats hot one moment or one season is on

the 2-for-$5 rack at the Salvation Army the next.
Very quickly, then, you started to see kids sacking their pants
down past the crack of their butt, exposing their boxers under-
neath, looking a little less pressed and creased but still styling, still
caring about their appearance. Or youd see some kid swimming in
a huge shirt that looked like it could fit a couple of his boys at the
same time. It was a cultivated look and it reached all the way up
the line, to the top rap and hip-hop artists of the moment, and even
on up to the NBAwhich to a kid from Hollis, Queens was like
Hollywood royalty. Look back at video from early in Michael Jordans
career and check out those tighty-whitey type shorts they used to
wear, and compare that to the baggy, below-the-knees look they
were wearing by the time he retired. Its like the uniforms went in
for a complete redesign, and the shift reflected what these top ath-
letes had gotten used to wearing when they were ballin back in
the hood.
There are a couple theories on why this style took hold. The first
says that the low-pants look had its roots in the inordinately high rate
of incarceration in the African American community. It was a jail-
house look, the theory went. You couldnt keep belts or strings in
your cell because you might hang yourself, so your pants would ride
low and youd develop this cocky jailhouse shuffle to go along with
the look. I never bought into this, because if youd look at pictures of
kids in their prison garb, the stuff was actually pretty form-fitting.
Plus, it had always been the case, that you couldnt wear a belt in the
joint, so this one strikes me as a kind of urban fashion legend, that
this style would just catch on, all of a sudden.
Another theory was that inner city black kids were so poor they
were used to wearing clothes that didnt quite fit just yet. A big
brother or cousin or some kid across the street would grow out of a
shirt or a pair of pants, and it would get handed down before the next

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kid in line might have been ready for it, but hed start wearing it any-
way. Over time, you started to see kids wear their big brothers
clothes with some pride and swagger, even if the item didnt exactly
fit, and soon enough a style took off. This one makes a whole lot
more sense to me, from a sociological perspective, although here too
there was nothing really newkids had always gotten hand-me-
downs from their older siblings and cousins, so this alone couldnt
have accounted for the swing.
Theres still another line of thinking that our clothes got looser and
baggier to accommodate whatever else we were into at the time. Ill
give you an example: graffiti-tagging was a giant big deal in New York,
throughout the 70s and 80s, just as it was in other urban areas
around the country. If you were into it youd be running around with
all these tall cans of spray paint, and you needed a place to put them
in your pants or in your jacket without looking like you were packing.
So among a certain group of kids who were big into graffiti, loose
pants with big, deep pockets were the hot thing, or big bubble coats
that could hold all those cans without bulking up the look of an
already bulky garment.
And heres another take: you had all these kids break-dancing and
rapping and hip-hopping to a distinctly new beat, in such a way that
they might bust out of their clothes if they fit too tight. All of a sud-
den, you needed a little room to moveout on the dancer floor or
down on the blacktopand its possible the clothes got a little bigger
as a result. Keep in mind, it wasnt just a New York City phenome-
non, this move to a looser style of clothing; it wasnt even necessar-
ily urban; early on, some of our biggest sales blips were to
skateboarders in Seattle, and break-dancers in Japan, so you never
could tell what would catch on, or where, or why.
My theory is that it was all these things taken togetherthe
hand-me-downs, the graffiti, the break-dancing, maybe even a piece
or two of the prison legendmix-mastered with the fact that we

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finally had a little bit of money to demonstrate our own sense of

style, and at the other end you had Karl Kani, Walker Wear, Cross
Colours and these other early lines, reinforcing this new trend.
Anyway, thats the look we inherited, the look we built on, the look
we meant to make our own.

>> STOREFRONT AND CENTER

One of the great benefits of our association

with Samsung was supposed to be the companys
deep pockets to help us extend our reach into tra-
ditional forms of advertising, but our first efforts
in this area were anything but high-end. In fact, our
very first marketing push was a street-level effort
that cost so little we could have mounted it our-
selves, without any of our backers money.
Our campaign, if you could even call it that,
wouldnt have worked anywhere but big cities,
where storeowners have these ugly reinforced
security gates they pull down in front of their
doors and windows when they close up for the
night. Weve all seen these pulled-down gates,
theyre terrible eyesores, and I hit on the idea of
spray-painting our FUBU logo on the gates of
about 50-75 mom-and-pop type retail outlets
throughout the city.
It was a win-win set-up, the way I saw it. And
happily the storeowners must have seen it the
same way, because not a single one of them
turned me down when I pitched them the idea. We
went in and cleaned up these metal gates, which

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the store owners loved, slapped some colorful

artwork on them and called it a billboard.
It cost about $200 to do each gate. You
couldnt touch that kind of penetration with any
kind of traditional advertising, not for that money.
I went out and did most of the gates myselfusu-
ally at night, usually with an assistant. The drill was
Id throw on a coat of plain silver to use as a back-
ground, then Id paint out a stencil of our FUBU
logo, and add the phrase authorized dealer. It
actually looked pretty sexymuch better than the
rusted, graffiti-stained corrugated metal I was
painting over.
One by one, we had these little marketing out-
posts positioned in key neighborhoods all over the
cityand eventually down into Philadephia as well.
And Ill tell you, it was a powerful tool, because
after six or seven oclock, when these stores
closed up for the night, wed be in full view of
every bus, car, taxi and pedestrian who happened
to pass. Same thing happened the next day, dur-
ing the morning rush, because most of these
stores didnt open until ten or eleven oclock, so
we hit a whole other demographic. The beauty
part was that it didnt cost much beyond time and
supplies, and it reminded me that even when you
do have some deep pockets to underwrite an
advertising campaign sometimes the best way to
get the word out is on the cheap, on the fly, on
the down low.

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Ill spend a little bit of time here on the money we started to

make, because thats one of the first things people ask me about,
what its like to go from scraping together enough money to cover
the rent and the electric bill to having more money than I could think
how to spend. Let me tell you, its not a bad problem to have, but the
truth is the money meant more to me than what it could buy. Dont
get me wrong, the money was great, but in the beginning I looked on
it as a way to keep score, to measure our success. It was a kind of
validation, a signal that our concept for these clothes had taken hold,
that our decision to throw in with the Weisfelds had been a good one,
that we had every reason to expect a bright future.
And that future was upon us before we knew it. I sold the house
on Farmers Boulevard about six months into our distribution deal.
Wed moved the factory operation out of there early on, and my boys
took turns moving out into places of their own, but I stayed on for a
while because it was bought and paid for, and because it was what I
knew. After a while, though, the FUBU line got so popular, and I
became so closely associated with it in my neighborhood, that people
were coming to the house at all hours. It was like a local shrinethe
place where FUBU got off the ground. People were looking for free
merchandise, or to stick us up, or just to hang.
Pretty quickly, the money got in the way of almost every per-
sonal relationship I had. Well, maybe not in the way, but it became
part of the conversation, part of the dynamic. I started to realize that
everybody I knew had a $5,000 problem. Its funny, but that was
always the amount. First couple months, when people first got the
idea that we were making money, theyd hit me up for $100 or
maybe $1,000, but that $5,000 number took hold soon after that.
There must have been some meeting, somewhere, and everyone
agreed on that figure. Anything more, and Id probably turn them
away. Anything less, and theyd come away thinking they could have
squeezed me for more.

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Hey Daymond, theyd usually begin. Can I talk to you? Was

wondering if you could help me out.
Then thered be a whole song and dance over what the money
was fora legit business deal gone bad, back rent, some missed car
payments, sick mother, bail, whatever . . . Craziest story I heard was
from someone whod gotten his girlfriend pregnant and needed it for
an abortion, but the sick part was hed claimed she already had an
abortion and the doctors left behind the babys arm. The guy actually
said he needed the money for a second operation, so they could
remove the arm before it got rotten and infected.
Needless to say, I let this one slide, but as often as not I kicked
in. If it was someone I knew really well and I wanted to help out Id
say, How much do you need?
Five thousand dollars, theyd say. Without fail. That was the
number. And theyd hold their hands out like it was meant to be a
loan, but of course Id never see any of that money back. And as
FUBU continued to prosper, and I had money to give, I gave it freely,
without any strings attached. I never fooled myself into thinking I
would see that money again, or that these people would find some
way to pay me back in kind.
That first year, after the money started kicking in, I think I gave out
maybe $50,000 in loans. Then the money got a little bigger, so I got
a little more generous. Each year after that, I gave out about
$200,000. Family. Friends. Friends of friends. And nobody ever paid
me back. But then I realized I couldnt give out money like this for-
ever. It had to end somewhere, so I started saying no. Didnt mat-
ter what the request was, or who was doing the requesting, my
default answer became no, and it cost me a lot of friendships. You
know, people heard Id given money to so-and-so, and they couldnt
understand why I wouldnt give the same money to them. But it
had to end, and do you know what? Those $5,000 problems, people
somehow got past them. They survived. Dont know if those

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money troubles went away or got put on hold or what, but they
werent life or death. People managed.

>> MY BODYGUARD

Yeah, I have a bodyguard. His name is Grim. Hes

my constant shadow. Has been since 1997, right
after we hit big. He tells me to stay away from an
event, for whatever reason, I stay away. He knows
his business. Hed been on tour with everyone from
Def Comedy Jam to The Rolling Stones, was likely
considered the best at what he does, thought he
was giving up that hectic, itinerant lifestyle when he
got down with me. But its been insane. None of us
expected it.
Theres a downside, though. I walk into a room
with a bunch of executives, Grims got my back,
these guys look at me like Im some kind of thug.
Who knows, maybe theyd look at me that way with
or without a bodyguard, but thats the first impres-
sion I make, The thing is, soon as word got out
that we were making money, I didnt feel safe. It
was reported one year that we made $350 million,
and people must have thought I had all of it under
my bed, with the number of times my house was
broken into. There were extortionists coming
round. My family was threatened. Plus, at any given
time, I could be walking around with $200,000
worth of jewelry. So why not have a bodyguard? It
isnt a power thing, or a gangsta thing. It isnt a
show of strength. Its peace of mind.

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My boy Grim is an ex-Navy Seal and a martial arts

Grand Master. Hes disciplined. Doesnt drink. Doesnt
smoke. Doesnt party. And he knows that when I drink
or party he may have to stop me from getting into a
conflict because he knows it could cost me millions of
dollars to settle a resulting lawsuit. A lot of celebrities
hire friends who are in it just to party. Thats why
a lot of rappers get shot, or get into unnecessary
trouble. Hire the best, thats my position. And Grim
is absolutely the best. Bar none.

So there were all these well-meaning people coming out of the

woodwork, seeking me out at the house on Farmers Boulevard, com-
ing to me with their hands out, and then on top of that there were all
these no-accounts, merely looking to pinch something for them-
selves, without even the pretense of asking for a loan. It got to where
I couldnt live there anymore, much as I might have wanted to, so I
sold the house and moved to a condo in Bayside, probably less than
10 miles away. I was still in Queens, still hanging on the same streets
I used to roam as a kid, still running with the same crowd, but I was
living in a nice place and surrounding myself with nice things and gen-
erally enjoying some of the finer things that came with life on a halfway
decent starting salary.
There was an old Jewish guy named Hal, part of Normans sales
force, kept his eye on us soon as we started coming to the office. He
could see we were onto something. He could see the potential. And
every time Id see him in the hallways hed say, Kid, save your
money. Thats it. Just, Kid, save your money. I wish like hell Id lis-
tened to him, and I thank God we still have a strong business,
because its extremely easy to spend it all. The lifestyle we lead, the

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contrast to how we all grew up . . . if we werent careful, the money

could have changed nearly everything.
A funny sidebar on Hal, long as Im on it. In the garment industry,
people use the expression on wheels to describe a deal that could
come back to youmeaning, essentially, that the other party could
give back whatever it was at any time. So Hal had the habit, when-
ever you asked him to walk you through a sale, hed say it was on
wheels with his pants rolled down, which is how it sometimes goes
in every business, right?
We didnt go crazy with the money just yet. That would come.
From the get-go, J got himself a little Jeep, so we could load it up with
samples and run around to all these video sets. I got a hot new Lexus.
(This was around the time I got stuck for my car in Rockville Centre,
out on Long Island, visiting my girlfriend.) Wasnt just me, with a fine
new ride. We all grabbed something to drive, and we started working
ridiculous hours. We lived to work, just about, to get this line up and
thriving. I would sleep in the office half the time. Years later, I would
take a place just across the street, so I could crash when I was work-
ing late, but back then Id just find a comfortable place to stretch out
for a couple hours, grab some sleep and get back to it.

>> OVER-BALLING

We had our own name for early spending

sprees. Over-balling. Dont know who came up with
that one, but we all knew what it meant because
we all suffered from it. Those first checks would
come in, and thered be more zeroes at the end of
em than wed seen since our high school progress
reports, and we couldnt contain ourselves. We
used to call it Christmas, every time thered be a

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distribution checkand happily for us Christmas

came round a couple times each year.
My biggest weakness back then was for real
estate. I couldnt help myself, I just kept buying
houses. On Long Island. In Florida. Upstate New
York. Wherever I saw something I liked, in a place
I didnt mind being. One of my first trips down to
Florida, I ended up buying a baby mansion, and a
condominium just a couple blocks away. That, to
me, was an investment. I didnt always manage
these investments all that well. I wasnt smart
enough to rent some place out if I knew I wasnt
going to be staying there enough nights each year
to justify the carrying costs, but for the most part
I made money on these deals. At the very least, I
came out whole.
Cars werent exactly sound investments,
though. This was over-balling in the extreme. When
me and my partners turned 30, we bought each
other new rides. Anyway, that was the idea. J
actually bought me a boat, because I already had
enough cars. I bought him a Bentley. Carl got a
Corvette, and Keith got a S500 Mercedes Benz.
We never thought wed make it to 30, so it was
something to celebrate, but there was always
something to celebrate. Cars, jewelry, Cristal, over-
the-top parties and press junkets . . . we spent a
ton of money we could never get back, but we were
having too much fun to regret it. It was all so new,
so fresh, so ridiculous, its like it wasnt real.

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Best example of the ridiculous excess that kicked

in before we got used to having money: I went out
to the store one day and asked my guys if they
wanted me to pick anything up for them. They of
course said yes (they always said yes), except on
this trip the store turned out to be a Mercedes
Benz dealershipso I ended up buying that S500
for Keith, just so I wouldnt come home empty-
handed. Like I said, ridiculous. Crazy ridiculous, but
the money ran straight from our pockets to our
heads.

There was a six, seven month period in there after we signed the
distribution deal when we were all in a weird kind of holding pattern,
almost like a transition. The money started rolling in, and we couldnt
spend it fast enough, but we kept our focus at work. We kept at it.
We basically went from being this raggedy crew of designers to a
legitimate, high-end outfit, all in the time it took to sign our deal, and
naturally there were some growing pains. There were also a lot of
firstslike our first distribution checks, our first trips to Europe and
Asia, our first significant hires outside our core group, and on and on.
Let me explain about those distribution checks, because I dont
want it to come across like Bruce and Norman were doling them out
as they felt like it. That wasnt how things were set up. Heres how
it worked: as I wrote earlier, me and my FUBU partners retained full
ownership and control of the FUBU brand. We were our own separate
entity. And then, alongside us, there was Norman and Bruce and their
associates, Alliance Worldwide, which in the beginning was under-
written by their Samsung corporate parent. Then, we created a kind of
holding company for the two companies called GTFMwhich stood for,

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Get the F***ing Money!which we split down the middle. We had

a whole formula worked out, for how much money wed set aside
against orders, and inventory, and for operating expenses and future
capital expenses, and whenever that number was met wed take
whatever was left and call it a bonus. And each time out, thats truly
what it felt likea bonus.
It was a nice set-up on both sides of the deal, and I give all credit
to Norman and Bruce for having the courage to consider it. Actually,
it was their idea. I was prepared to do the first deal they offered us,
the standard distribution deal, but when our signals got crossed the
scales tilted a little bit in our favor. When you think about it, its a
remarkable thing, the way they threw in with us. They had a family
business. They had about six people in the office, including their sis-
ter, Pam, and a couple salesmen. They did bubble coats, and thats it.
Then they struck some kind of deal with Samsung, to head up this
giant companys apparel division, but they kept their little family busi-
ness on the side. And thats just what it was when we hooked up, a
little family business, and still they opened their doors to four young
black guys, who in turn hired another ten black guys, and right away
the culture of the place was transformed. It was still a family busi-
ness, but all of a sudden it was a blended family. We went to all their
weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. They came to all our celebrations. They
fit us right in.
I dont think I could have done that, if the tables had been turned.
Us FUBU guys, we were all so rough around the edges, making it up
as we went along, but we had some rope. We were in charge of our
own budget. We ran our own show. The Weisfelds put a lot of faith
in us, and I was determined to pay it off, but Ive got to admit, if I had
this nice family business, I would never have allowed these four
strangers off the street, let along four black guys I didnt know to
come into my life, to put my money and balls on the table and say to
them, Were gonna roll with you.

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You dont see this kind of partnership too often, and when you do
its worth noting. Two different cultures come together, and when
each side respects the other as individuals and as types, good things
can happen. You see it every now and then in the urban market, like
with Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen over at Def Jam, and when it
works it can be extremely rewarding. And yet you dont see it
enough. A lot of times, African-Americans will look on at white cor-
porate America and grumble that they dont get a fair shake. And I
always think, Well, why would anybody stick their necks out for
them? Whats the benefit? Theres always a certain comfort level
when you surround yourself with your own, with what you already
know. Were not owed anything by these other cultures, just as
theyre not owed anything by us, but if we can combine and respect
each other and work together we can make one color, green. With
FUBU and Alliance Worldwide and GTFM, thats been the formula.
Black and white equals green.
It took a while for everyone to get used to each other, to try on
how we liked to work, how we might work together. Me and my
boys, we got in the habit of coming in to the office around noon or
so, and we got some funny looks the first couple weeks, but the
truth was we were out into the early morning in the clubs, trying to
connect with artists and directors and actors and all kinds of taste-
makers that could help our lineand that was only after wed put in
a late night at the office, at the design tables or wherever. We
worked hard, we just didnt punch the same clock as everyone else,
and it took an uneasy couple weeks to sort through all of that.
Meanwhile, to our own little corner of the outside world, it was
business as usual for the time being. The people in the clubs, they
still looked on us as the boys from Hollis who were making a name
for themselves. The rap and hip-hop artists, they still looked on FUBU
as a happening brand. I dont think people outside our own circle had
any idea how big wed gotten in such a short space of time, and this

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was important because it meant we hadnt lost our cache. We were

still on that cutting edge, still on the rise, still just four brothers from
the hood looking to dress a bunch of other people in loose-fitting,
styling clothes they couldnt find anywhere else. And the four of us,
we took great pride in showing that African-Americans can export or
produce something other than rappers and athletes. Very quickly,
clothing designers like FUBU became the number one product of
African-Americans. We were voted the second-largest minority-
owned company in New York, by Crains New York Business. We
could step back and look at what we were doing and appreciate that
we were selling hard goods that didnt happen to be CDs or DVDs.
As our boy LL used to say, we werent just dancing for chicken any-
more. We were businessmen. We went from picking cotton to sell-
ing it, and I hope we made our forefathers proud.
Those first trips were . . . well, a trip. All of a sudden, I was in the
fashion business, so I was jetting off to Amsterdam, London, Paris
and Hong Kong, and this time I didnt have to use those stand-by
American Airlines passes. This time we didnt have to sleep head to
toe in the same bed. Theres a line we used to kick around in the
hood, Youre in the NBA now. It meant you hit the big-time, play-
ing with the big boys, and it was a line I kept hearing, back of my
head. In our case, we went from zero to sixty in just about no time
flat. There was no period of apprenticeship, no learning at the heels
of an experienced executive. We were making it up as we went
along. I remember placing my very first order with my production guy
in New York, Mr. Cho, and he said to me, I dont even know why
were placing this order because maybe youll sell eight hundred
pairs. Its just not worth it. That really pissed me off, but I was a
straight up businessman now so I kept my cool. I didnt go off on this
guy. I couldnt. We were part of this new blended family. We were in
this thing together, so I let his comment kind of hang there, and I look
at our sales reports now with a special pride every time our jeans

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sales spike up a bit. To date, weve moved maybe 30 million pairs of

jeans, and Mr. Cho must be eating his words every day, but we joke
about it now. And hes still the best at what he does.

>> WHY THE YANKEES ALWAYS WIN

Theres a great scene in that Steven Spielberg

movie, Catch Me If You Can, where Christopher
Walken tries to explain to Leonardo DiCaprio why
the Yankees always win. He basically says, The
other guys cannot stop looking at their stripes.
Ive thought about that line a lot. You can take
it to mean whatever you want it to mean. To me,
it means a couple things. For one, it means that
the Yankees are stylin, and if you feel good about
your appearance therell be a certain strut, a cer-
tain confidence, a certain self-respect in how you
go about your business that it carries over into
your performance on the field. Those pinstripes,
theyre never out of fashion. Theyre classic. And
when you move about with classic threads theres
an extra bounce to what you do.
It also means that the Yankees have succeeded
in making themselves a brand, and in using that
brand to advantage. They wear their success, their
history, on their sleeves, and they wear it with such
pride and honor it cant help but intimidate. Their
competitors take one look at that Yankee uniform,
with those Yankee pinstripes, and it starts to play
with their heads. Theyre down in the count before
the first pitch is even thrown.

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Theres a parallel to each of these interpreta-

tions in the African-American community, where style
also counts, where first-impressions count, where
feeling good about yourself and your appearance
counts most of all. The clothes you wear, the jewelry
you custom-design, the car you drive . . . these things
say a lot about you. They announce who you are,
where youve been, how you want to be seen. Like
when I walk into a room with a gold FB chain around
my neck. In some rooms, its considered gaudy and
tasteless; in others, its an emblem of honor, respect
and accomplishment. Some people might not recog-
nize my face, but the FB emblem will never be mis-
taken. Its my stripes. Yeah, its a huge shout-out to
the money you have in your pocket, but it goes beyond
that, I think. Were not just saying, Hey, Im rich, so
take me seriously. Were saying, Take me seriously
because I care about my appearance, because I take
myself seriously. Were saying, Hey, I stand on the
shoulders of a lot of people.
Thats the Yankees, man. They take themselves
seriously, and they stand on the shoulders of the
people who used to wear the same uniform. Thats
why the other guys cant keep from looking at their
stripesbecause they represent.

One of the biggest adjustments came in personnel, because obvi-

ously the four of us couldnt run this operation on our own. We wanted
to do it up right. There was a certain pressure to hire African-Americans,
as jobs opened up, although it wasnt really unspoken . . . I heard

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about it whenever I went another way. See, my thing was to hire the
best people for the job. Plain and simple. If it worked out that I could
give a brother or sister a boost, that was great. If it didnt, that was
great too, because it meant Id found someone better suited to the
job. Id get all these calls, saying, Come on, man, hook me up, but
if I only hired these come-on-man-hook-me-ups, my business would
die and I would no longer be able to help anybody.
It took a while for me to figure out this hiring and firing business,
and to set the right tone around the officeone that would allow us
to get the most out of our employees and at the same time to stay
true to the impulse behind FUBU. We werent looking for a desk job
for ourselves, so we couldnt expect the people we hired to take a
drudgery approach to their work. We didnt want 9-to-5ers, phoning it
in. We wanted to establish a creative, exciting, hard-charging environ-
ment that was also exhilarating and funlike a party with a purpose.
We werent out to bust anybodys butts, but we were hoping to find
good people who would take it on themselves to bust their own.
I came to realize that it takes an employee about two weeks to
mimic the way he or she is being treated in the workplace. Treat your
staff like crap, and theyll eventually pass it on to your customer. Treat
them like gold, and theyll go to the wall for you and your product.
Two weeks. Thats the honeymoon period. Thats the stretch of time
youll usually get in grace, when people are out to please their
bosses, no matter how theyre being treated. After that, what you
put in starts to get put back out. That explains why people behind the
counter at the post office or the Department of Motor Vehicles can
be so sour and unhelpful. They hate their jobs. Same with some
cops, and other civil servants. You see it in the retail sector as well,
with minimum-wage type hires putting minimum-wage type effort
into their service, which is why we tried to pay our top people as
much as we could afford instead of as little as we could get away
with, to keep our staff as happy and productive as possible.

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>> GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL

One of the routines I developed, early on, was

to sit my people down for a game of cut-throat
Monopolyonce a month or so, after hours. For a
while, we played a couple times a week. It was a
great release from all the tension and pressure
that would build up during the day, and more than
that it turned out to be a chance to see the people
who worked for you outside of a traditional office
dynamic.
Think about it: around a Monopoly board, you
can see how sharp someone is, how they deal with
people, whether theyre hesitant or honorable. Its
a great tell. Didnt start out like any kind of strat-
egy or litmus test. A group of us just started play-
ing, is all, and I started to notice the value in the
game, started inviting others to sit in, on a rotat-
ing basis.
Understand, it wasnt a garden-variety game of
Monopoly, the kind you used to play when you were
a kid. No way. This was vicious. Wed play for money
sometimesmaybe $50, maybe $100, whatever we
felt like at the timebut it was never about the
money. This was killer, full-throttle Monopoly, and it
was all about winning. It was about pride and respect
and bragging rights, and whatever it took to out-
play, out-smart, out-hustle your opponents.
Over time, the game cost a couple people their
jobs, or maybe even made a couple careers. Dont
mean to suggest that I made my hiring and firing

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decisions based on a board gamebut hey, Id learn

some things that colored my thinking. I mean, you
play ten games with someone, and theyre con-
stantly cheating or being slick, you start to ques-
tion whether theyre the type of person you want
representing you or your company. Conversely,
you play ten games with someone, and theyre
making deals and working it out and finding a way
to win, you take notice of that too, and maybe you
fast-track someone as a result. You lean towards
what you see around that board. You play with a
guy, he doesnt know how to pull the trigger, he
cant see all the way down the road, takes a very
short view on things, you make a note. You see a
guy, cant take the pressure, gets mad when
things dont go his way, starts to throw things, you
make a note of that as well.
Yeah, its just a game, but a lot of people think
business is just a game, too. Were all playing to
win. With Monopoly, its the kind of game that
reveals a persons character. Chances are, its
stuff that would come out eventually, but it puts a
clock on eventually and gives you information youll
need to get and keep ahead. And it doesnt have to
be Monopoly. It could be anything. Poker. Hoops.
Pin The Tail on the Donkey. This is why rich white
guys spend so much time on the golf course, doing
deals. Find whatever works for you and your group
and make something out of it. And be sure to take
notes.

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I looked up one day and counted over 200 people working for us,
in one capacity or another. At one point, with all our licensees, it got
to over 300, and I realized that it takes being an employer of a fairly
big operation to recognize that there are a lot of people out there who
major in minor things. I cant take credit for that lineits Tony
Robbinssbut soon as I heard it I thought, Thats the truth. People
go about their business in their individual ways, and a lot of them
spend a little too much time on the small stuff and not nearly enough
time on the big picture, and it fell to me and my boys to figure out
which personalities to match with all the different things that needed
to get done as we grew our line. Even among the four of us, we all
had our strengths and weaknesses, the things we liked to focus on,
the things we would just as soon let slide, but our performances
werent necessarily up for review. We answered to each other, and
we balanced each other out.
It was in filling out our ranks that we sometimes got into trou-
blebecause lets face it, we didnt always get it right. Sometimes
it fell to me to let one of our people go. I can still remember the
time I lost my firing virginitythe first time I had to fire someone. I
didnt really have a frame of reference for this kind of thing. Id been
fired once, from my part-time job at the popcorn stand back when I
was a kid, and in that case the guy simply discovered that the regis-
ter was short by a couple dollars so he said, Get the hell out of here,
youre fired. Cant imagine he obsessed about it. He just fired me.
But when it came time for me to pull my first trigger, I was all bent
out of shape about it. Id hired this guy as a designer, and he was tal-
ented enough, but after hed been with us a while I could see he
wasnt what we needed. He had a good attitude, and a positive
energy, but he just couldnt execute the way I would have liked. I
gave him every chance to turn things around, figured maybe it would
just take him a little time to get caught up in our style, but there came
a time when I had to admit it wasnt working out. So I called him in,

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and of course he was smiling, and up, and positive, and I said, Ive
got to let you go.
Took this guy completely by surprise. His face just turned. He got
short of breath. He had a family. Two kids, wife, house, mortgage . . .
the whole deal. He panicked. He was worried how hed make ends
meet, and I tried to set him at ease, send him off with a reasonable
package, promise to hook him up someplace else. And I think if he
was honest he would have agreed that this hadnt been a good fit,
but it was still hard. And this was firing a good person, someone who
meant well. The screw-ups, they were always an easy fire. If any-
thing, Id be a little too quick to let these idiots go. Someone would
set me off, or Id get it in my head that they werent as focused as I
was, Id want to fire them immediately. Keith would have to stop me.
He had a little more experience in corporate leadership. Hed tell me
to calm down and take a longer view.

>> I FIRED OPRAH

Sometimes, its the road not taken that gets

you where youre meant to go. Despite our early
successes, and despite the fact that wed been
written up in virtually every major publication and
interviewed on every major news program, we
couldnt get a break from Oprah. We thought that
would just put us over the top, you know, an
appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, and it was
a real puzzle to me, why she wouldnt put us on.
In many ways, this was the first marketing or
promotional nut I couldnt crack, and I couldnt
think what to do about it, and around 1999 we
hired a young woman in public relations who hap-

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pened to be Oprahs relative. It wasnt a strategy,

hiring this woman; we had no idea she was related
to Oprah. And when I did find out, I never came out
and asked her to work those family ties on FUBUs
behalf; I tried to respect her privacy.
Even so, she was plugged in to Oprahs star
power, because this woman would be at red carpet
events before me and my boys. Shed be at pre-
mieres and major concerts, sitting in the front
row, while I was back in the fourth or fifth. She was
everywhere. Only trouble was, she wasnt really on
top of her job, so the dilemma became, What do I
do about Oprahs relative? We were already having
a tough time getting a hearing from Oprahs pro-
ducers. We had a shot to be on the show early on,
but they wanted to bring cameras by the house,
and shoot video of me and my family, and all the
bling that supposedly came with our success, and
I didnt want to open up those doors in such a pub-
lic way. So that first opportunity fell away, and we
couldnt get on as businessmen or intellectuals
talking about the hip-hop marketplace, and I had to
think that firing the womans relative wouldnt
exactly help our chances. But the fact remained,
she wasnt the right person for the job. Nothing
against her, but we needed to make a change.
I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I
realized that if Oprah knew the situation, she prob-
ably wouldnt want her relative getting some kind of
free pass, just because of her famous family con-

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nections. (Thats why she probably didnt work for

Oprah.) So it became clear we had to fire this per-
son, and as I did so I couldnt shake thinking thered
be some kind of fallout. But the thing is, the fallout
was all to the good, because we ended up making
a lot of noise on Montel Williamss show, and that
was just fine with us. So we went ahead and booked
Montels show, and he and I hit it off. Now we
hang, we go snowboarding at his place in Utah, and
hes become a huge inspiration to me. Weve since
been on his show a bunch more times, and weve
done some great thingslike give away a million dol-
lars worth of clothes on his program to people in
and around New Orleans, just after the devasta-
tion of Hurricane Katrina.
So there we were, with no more inside track to
Oprah, a good friend now to one of her competi-
tors, and I allowed myself to build up all this resent-
ment towards this womanthe same resentment
that ran through a lot of the hip-hop community,
because it was felt she was boycotting rappers on
her show. Now of course I realize full well that she
probably never even knew we were trying to get on
her show, but this is how I built it up in my head.
Id hear people talking, how Oprah is prejudiced,
how she doesnt like rappers, and this and that,
and Id buy into it. Id fuel those same rumors
because, after all, shed never given us the time
of day. And then she comes out and does this
Legends special, paying homage to twenty-five

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influential black women like Diahann Carrol and Lena

Horne and Coretta Scott King, women who had
inspired her for whatever reason. She also high-
lighted another twenty-five young unswomen like
Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell, and she put her-
self in that category, saying shes no spring chicken
but still young in comparison to these other leg-
ends. That one show opened the eyes of a new
generation to some of the most ground-breaking
women of our time. It couldnt have been done any
better.
I looked on at home and couldnt help but be
inspired. Just from that one show, I started to see
that there were a lot of similarities between me
and Oprah, in the way we ran our lives and our
companies. Id allowed myself to build up all this
anger towards her, and chances were she had no
idea there was anything going on between us. It
reminded me of all the grief we used to get over at
FUBU, about not being black-owned, about not giv-
ing back to our community. You know, its easy to
throw pebbles at an elephant, and I wasnt giving
her the respect she deserved.
I still havent been on her show, by the way, but
now I dont blame Oprah for itand I dont blame
the fact that I had to fire her relative.

Hiring was also tricky. My thing was to let people surprise you.
You know, give someone a chance. If I had a gut feeling about some-
one, Id usually offer them a spot, even if there was nothing in their

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background to suggest they were the best qualified for the job. Early
on, I brought in some of my boys from Red Lobster, and that didnt
always work out, but I liked to bring in people who were hungry,
people who appreciated the opportunity, because I put myself on
their side of the desk and realized Id work double-time to reward the
benefit of the doubt. If someone put that kind of faith in me, Id be
sure not to disappoint.
You never know where youll find your next asset. My president
of marketing, Leslie Short, has been a Godsend, and she wasnt any-
where near the FUBU picture when we first started out. In fact, she
used to work for my boy Montel, as one of his producers, and before
that she was a ballet dancer in Europe and Asia, but now I cant imag-
ine running our business without her insight and inspiration. Its like
she came out of nowhere, and wed be nowhere without her.
My head designer right now is a woman named Simone Newbolt,
and she started as an intern, not long after we were up and running.
Now I cant live without her. Shes like my right arm. Theres also
Malcolm Wilson, my personal assistant, who keeps me organized
and moving forward. Before Malcolm, there was Anthony Ballard
Tony, my old bike shop partner from when we were kidsand he
was more than my assistant. He was my driver, my housekeeper, my
babysitter, my accountant. And Joe Levin, my head salesman, who
really gets the FUBU message and helps us to put it out there.
A lot of our best people started as interns. Theyd work for six
months, maybe a year or two, and the expectation was they would
dedicate themselves to their jobs as if they were being paid, and if
they performed well theyd graduate to some kind of paying position.
That was the unspoken bargain. But at FUBU, we had a pretty rigid
salary structure. Wed start our people out at, say, $30,000, and
sooner or later, given the popularity of our brand, some other designer
would try to hire someone away from us and offer, say, $50,000. We
couldnt match that. We tried to, in the beginning, and people went

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from $30,000 to $100,000, and when you spread that kind of money
around among a couple dozen of your senior people, your payroll gets
a little crazy. One year it was $3 million, the next year it was $7 mil-
lion, the next year it was $9 million. It didnt make any sense.
This kind of thing got a little uglynot because our good people
would leave, which I guess was inevitable, but because theyd get
mad that we couldnt match their outside offer, which I guess was
unavoidable. My thinking was, Hey, if you can do better someplace
else, then go someplace else. But underneath that thinking was a cer-
tain disappointment. I mean, we took these people on, gave them an
opportunity, trained them, and then someone comes along and makes
them a better offer and theyre out the door. Theyd say, Daymond,
I worked that first year for free, and after that I was only making thirty
thousand! And I couldnt really counter that, except I might have
pointed out that I could have hired a person with experience, who
would have come to FUBU with a bulging Rolodex, who would have
brought us more business, but people dont hear that when you lay it
out for them. They dont hear that we were making an investment in
them, that you gave them an opportunity. They hear what they want
to hear, and what they wanted to hear from me is that I would match
their outside offer. (But of course, that outside offer wouldnt exist if
they didnt have the FUBU name, training and contacts behind them.)
My issue wasnt over the fact that theyd leave, but that theyd
go out the door saying the FUBU guys were the worst employers on
the planet. What was that about? If it was me, Id have played it dif-
ferently. First off, I might have been a bit more loyal, and hung in with
the company that gave me my first shot. But even if I did reach for
that bigger paycheck, Id have gone in to the person who hired me
and said, Thanks. I learned a lot from you. I wouldnt be where I am
today were it not for you. Thats the class move, right? Instead we
usually got a little bad-mouthing as these people made their way out
the door, and we had no choice but to take it because it would have

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cost us dearly if we broke from our salary structure. Why? Because

employees speak to each other. They compare notesand pay-
checks. Theres bitterness and jealousy if someone at the same gen-
eral level as someone else is making a bigger salary. Our thing was,
wed pay you to come back. If you left FUBU and we tried to hire you
back, we might have to set our salary structure aside, but we couldnt
go matching every offer that came in from a headhunter looking to
lure away our good people.
We couldnt chase everyone. Some of the ones who got away
went on to bigger and betteror, at least, on to something different.
If you look at the people who have been out in front of the rise to
prominence of the hip-hop movementpeople like Spike Lee (40
Acres and a Mule), Hype Williams, Andre Harrell (Uptown Records),
Russell Simmons (Def Jam), Jermaine Dupri (So So Def), J. Prince (Rap
A Lot), Dr. Dre, Puffy (Bad Boy) and me and my FUBU boys, along with
the editors of Source and Essence magazine, weve probably
employed thousands of talented African-Americans over the years.
Chances are, if youre young and black and making some noise in the
entertainment and fashion industries, you came through one of our
doorsand Im proud to have played my own small part in the devel-
opment of so many influential careers in the urban market, even if some
of these people have gone on to make their marks someplace else.

>> WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

There got to be such a mixed-bag of people

working for us at FUBU that we began to look like
the United Nations. We didnt plan it that way, but
thats how it shook out and over time it got to be
like a sitcom in our board room. We had the black
guys who worked in design, promotion and sales;

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the Koreans who worked with the vendors; the

Indians in manufacturing and production; the Jews
who worked in sales and finance; and on and on.
We all got along, but the culture clash could be
hilarious, and it took a while for us to learn each
others angles. For me and my boys, a lot of the
difficulties came over food. At least, thats what
we were told. Sounds stupid, I guess, but it got to
be a big deal. Wed be sitting around a conference
table, working through lunch, and wed sit down
around our plate of food like someone was looking
to steal it from us. And if someone did grab a fork-
ful without our permission, wed go off on them like
theyd hit on our sister. In our hood, you just dont
go digging in peoples things, but in some other cul-
tures its obviously cool, among friends, to just go
digging in without even asking.
We took our food seriously, probably because
there wasnt always enough of it to go around
when we were kids. And you had to watch us on
this, because wed grab your food like we had it
coming. It was a one-way street, far as we were
concerned. Some of our Jewish guys were fairly
religious, and theyd have prayers up in the office
on some days, and we figured out pretty quick that
they had food laid out for afterwards, so youd
have all the black guys waiting outside the confer-
ence room so we could swoop down on those plat-
ters as soon as their prayers were over, so we
could kick in the door and get our grub on.

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The Koreans, they had their own way of doing

business. Id tell my main production guy Mr. Cho
that I wanted a garment done up in purple, this
length, and delivered on a certain date, and because
he would have to interpret to some of the facto-
ries in Korean he would take liberties and for all I
know say Daymond wanted it in black, longer, and
delivered on whatever date he felt worked best. Id
talk to him in English, and hed spread the word in
Korean, and Id have to take it on faith that he was
following my orders. Sometimes he was, some-
times he wasnt. And when he wasnt, I learned, he
wasnt being disrespectful. He just had his own
ideas on seniority. Who do you listen to, if youre a
55-year-old Korean male? Probably not a 35-year-
old black guy, right? So we had to move a little bit
sideways with these guys, because they dont nec-
essarily listen to the people who sign the checks.
Its about seniority.
And theres a whole gender thing going on there
as well among Korean women, where the senior
female is known as the Annie, an honorific based
on age, not on value to the company, so we had to
learn that when we were dealing with the Koreans
we couldnt have a younger, higher-ranking female
employee give any kind of directive to an older
underling, because it just wouldnt fly. And an older
male is totally out of the question.
Its just a different corporate culture, a differ-
ent mindset. Like the Indians who work with us.

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Theyd shake their heads no when they meant

yes, but we all figured each other out eventually.
We all learned not to take ourselves too seri-
ouslybecause, in the end, we were all after the
same thing.

A lot of managers and executives are held hostage by their

employees because they dont know their own business. Theyve
never worked the line. At FUBU, we knew the drill from the ground
up, because wed done it all. Me and my boys, we worked the mail
room. We cut fabric. We designed new lines. We came up with the
marketing plan. Even as the big money started to roll in, we did it
alland we still do it all. Were constantly out there, working along-
side our people, putting in the same effort we expect from each of
them, and I happen to think its a powerful motivating tool. Thats not
why we do it, necessarily, but it is a great side benefit. It puts it out
there that we dont place ourselves above the work, that the success
of our line is paramount, that well do whatever it takes to succeed.
Also, we dont take our success for granted. We dont ask our people
to do anything we wouldnt do ourselves, anything we havent
already done a hundred times over.
Thats something I learned back at Red Lobster. The thinking
there, at the corporate level, was that managers needed to know
every aspect of the operation. That was the only way to know if any-
one was stealing from them, the only way to know how everyone
was managing their time, the only way to know what areas needed
to be improved. Plus, its the only way to CYA. If a cook or anybody
on the line suddenly quit at six oclock on a Saturday night, just
before your big rush, the manager needed to be able to flip back
his tie, put on an apron and cover. General Mills owned the Red

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Lobster chain at the time, and that was the General Mills approach.
They never wanted to be caught short.
I tried to build on that at FUBUonly not by design so much as
by necessity. Before we hooked up with Norman and Bruce, we
needed to do it all. It was just the four of us, and whatever friends or
family members we could rope in from time to time. We needed to
design our line, produce samples, sell them at trade shows, fill orders,
pack and ship and service our accounts. (Remember, I did most of the
sewing myself, on those first couple runs.) By now, weve moved on
from me, Keith, J and Carl having to pitch in, but were still pitching in.
Were still on the line. Im constantly flipping back my tie and getting
to work. (No, I dont actually wear a tie, but thats not the point.)
Nowadays, though, its out of habit, and with that habit comes a mes-
sage, either to my own people or to the people were doing business
with. It sets a positive example. And no detail is too small. For example,
I personally go down to the video sets and talk to some of these artists
who are wearing our clothes, and whenever I do theres a great wind-
fall. I could just as easily send one of my staff down, but it means a lot
when the CEO comes down himself. It means youre taking an interest,
down to every last detail. People notice that, and they appreciate it.
They say, You came down here yourself? And I say, Yeah, I did.
Because youre important to me and to the success of this company.
Its the same with our manufacturers. Maybe they think we beat
them up on price or whatever, but when were out on the road, mak-
ing the circuit, we make sure we got to the factories, not only to
make sure the product is right but to show that were serious about
doing business with them. Dubai, India, Hong Kong . . . Doesnt mat-
ter if its out of our way or deep into the middle of nowhere, I make
a point of building and nurturing these relationships, because in the
end theyre the only thing Ive got. Theyre the only thing covering me
in the event that my fry-cook up and quits on me, six oclock on a
Saturday night. This right here is the biggest piece of advice I can

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give to a young entrepreneur, to learn your business from the ground

up. Doesnt matter how low that ground is, but get down and dirty
and learn that business before you go anywhere.

>> THE HEAT CYCLE

Heres how it goes sometimes, when youre

measuring the life of a popular brand. First couple
months, youre at the ground level, and everybody
wants in. You might not be making any money, but
youre the flavor of the month, the number one
record, the talk of the town.
Everybody wants to be in on something new, to
be part of a family. Doesnt matter if its a gang, or
a trend, or whatever, theres this groundswell of
enthusiasm, and if you get caught up in it theres a
sense of belonging. Youre part of something spe-
cial. Thats why, even when a record label is intro-
ducing a new artist, theyll make sure that artist is
popular in his hometown, in some little city, some-
where, because theyve learned you cant go
national with an act unless it has that hometown
base and support. Otherwise, what the hell are you
belonging to? With FUBU, we had all these ambas-
sadors in their own hoods, guys who bought in to
what we were doing in a big way, who took a spe-
cial pride in being known as The FUBU Guy in
their small part of the world. That was their thing,
and it helped us to do our thing, because they felt
a certain pride of ownership, a connection to our
brand, and they wanted to pass it on.

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The American consumer always wants in, but

he wants in to . . . something. And this right here
is the crest of the wave, because once that some-
thing special is shared with everybody, once its on
the cover of Time or Newsweek or even People, its
not special anymore. In the clothing industry, you
can ride that wave from anywhere from two to five
years, when youre creating buzz, connecting with
the trend-setters and taste-makers and whoever it
is that sets the tone. At first, youre just hitting
the big marketsNew York, Los Angeles, Chicago,
Atlanta . . . these days, cities that tend to have a
thriving music and modeling industry. After that, it
washes over the rest of the country, and youre big
with a certain crowd in every market.
Okay, so now youre fiery hot, your inventory
has grown, your margins are lower, there are
knock-off companies out there looking to undercut
your brand, and your core customers have three
or four years of your product in their closets.
Theyre ready to move on, but now Middle America
has started to pay some attention. Now parents
are buying your clothes for their kids. Now youre
not as popular as you might have been when you
were riding the wave, but youre making more
money than ever before. The cache is gone, but
youre selling way more pieces, only the danger
here is that when Mommy and Daddy are buying
your clothes, they tend not to be the clothes you
want to go out and buy for yourself.

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Remember when Von Dutch first hit it big?

Ashton Kutcher and a whole bunch of MTV-types
started wearing their trucker caps, and Paris Hilton
was wearing it all day. They had a flagship outlet on
Melrose, and for whatever reason a lot of young
Hollywood seemed to tap into it. It was retro. It was
low-end done up in high-quality. It had everything
going for it. And it was everywhere. At one point,
at the tip of the juggernaut, I even thought of buy-
ing the company, when we were in a real acquisi-
tions mode. But then they just imploded. They
opened a couple stores, and they opened their dis-
tributionand then, almost as quickly as the line had
burst on the scene, they slowed down. Its the kiss
of death, for a line like that to grow too quickly, to
reach into a general market.
So what went wrong? Well, Von Dutch never
really changed its core design. They did t-shirts and
sweats and hats, with their eyeball-with-wings logo,
or the distinctive script Von Dutch. And because
they never changed things up, they made it easy
for counterfeiters to come in and pirate their line.
They didnt operate enough of their own retail out-
lets. They lost a little bit of control, which mean
they left hundreds of millions of dollars on the
table. Plus, their move into these department
stores just about sapped the life from the brand,
before it had run its course. The better move, the
longer-term move, might have been to let those
first two phases of the cycle play out, and then

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start launching different premium brands, as we

would try to do as the FUBU brand started to age.
Von Dutch, they got fiery hot and they misjudged
the delicate shift you need to make in the market
in response to that kind of heat. These days, you
either go low, or you go super premium. Theres no
reason to go to Sears anymore, because you have
Wal-Mart and K-Mart and Target, so you can
either go down that low road, or aim higher still.
And Im talking really high-end, otherwise you cant
differentiate. Thats what we did. We launched
Platinum FUBU, and following that we bought a
premium Australian line called Coogi and reposi-
tioned it for our American market. We lifted the
quality, and we raised the price, and we set the bar
as high as we possibly could, so that we could once
again ride that wave. And it wouldnt be quite the
same ride you were on initially, but it would be a
ride worth taking.
But those Von Dutch guys are smart, and if
they hit it big once, they can probably do it again.

That heat cycle was on full blast, almost from the beginning, and
I want to shine a light on a couple crazy, hectic, hard-to-believe devel-
opments and other related quick hits, just to give just a little taste
what things were like in and around the FUBU offices as the line
started to take off in a big way.

We became well-known for our parties and events, like our $4 mil-
lion, weekend-long Y2K bash in St. Martin, and a two-day concert fea-

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turing The Gap Band, Mary J. Blige, Case, Tina Marie and a mess of
artists. We gave away a couple hundred bottles of Cristal from the
stage (back when Cristal was still politically correct), flew down over
a thousand contest winners to take part in the festivities, and gener-
ated a ton of good will among artists and celebrities that lasted for the
next while . . .

Wed regularly get letters from families telling us their loved ones
had asked to be buried in FUBU clothing. Theyd send pictures, to
prove the point. Also, on the letters front, wed hear from white
kids who were getting beat up in school for wearing our line, and
wed always send back a poster or some other giveaway with a
note reminding the person that FUBU was not about a color, its
about a culture . . .

The success of FUBU meant the failure of my marriage. I havent

spoken a lot about my wife and children in these pages, because
I like to keep that part of my life private, but I think its important
to note that I lost my family during FUBUs climb. Nobody on their
death bed says, I wish I spent more time at the office, but that
was meand its something you have to understand if youre out
to succeed. As much as my wife gave me all the real advice I
needed, kept me grounded and focused, we still drifted apart. You
can try to keep a healthy balance, as I tried to do, but sometimes
the business gets the better of the deal . . .

In 2001, when a Georgia county school board banned high school

students from wearing t-shirts with the symbol of the Confederate
flag, a counter bill was proposed banning FUBU garments as well.
You had the one symbol of white supremacy, and some functionary
decided we were the symbol of black supremacy, like we were a
black version of the KKK . . .

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Also in 2001, Senator Hillary Clinton honored the FUBU founders

for our dedication to community service in the New York area
marking the first time the former First Lady gave out an award as
an elected official . . .

Similarly, outgoing New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani presented us

with one of the last awards he handed out while still in office . . .

Remember when I wrote earlier that one of the pipedreams back

in the beginning was to get a display in Macys? Well, we went
that one bettergetting a Macys window display on at least a
dozen occasions, including a first-of-its-kind, live-action, in-store (in-
window!) appearance, with the four of us on display, taking ques-
tions from shoppers on the street and posing for pictures . . .

We made our own splash in the sports world. Throughout Lenox

Lewiss heavyweight career, FUBU was on his shorts and in his
corner. We outfitted the champ, and put him in our ads, and he
became the face of FUBU in the sports arena . . .

A couple of our founding FUBU guys went to Johannesburg to

open our first free-standing store in South Africa, and received a
Secret Service-type escort around the city that eventually
included a stop to meet Nelson Mandela. South African
President, Thabo Mbeki, became so enraged that a separate meet
and greet had to be set up with him . . .

We became the first African-American company to sponsor a car in

the Indianapolis 500another out-of-the-box marketing opportunity.
We had a Chilean driver, an Hispanic crew, and our black ownership
group, which meant we really stood out in such staid, traditional
company . . .

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We were presented with dozens of keys to various cities, and

there were several FUBU days around the country, in cities like
Detroit and Miami, and I mention them here to show how deeply
connected some communities felt to our brand . . .

And speaking of community, wed make it a special point, every year

at Thanksgiving, to hand out thousands of turkeys all over New York
City. It was our way of quietly giving a little something back to the
hood . . .

Michael Jackson called up to our offices one day when he was in

New York, recording a new album. He was thinking about re-doing
his look, so I went down to his studio with a bunch of clothes, and
the booth was filled with stuffed animals of every size, color and
stripe. And candy! M&Ms and Reeses Pieces. Just shelves and
shelves of this stuff. Just for him. We sat around and talked, and
Mike seemed to be just a regular guy . . .

In one of the highlights of my career, FUBU was one of the first

companies to receive the Essence award, on national television,
given by the editors of Essence magazine. I can still remember
stepping to the podium to receive the honor and thinking, Weve
finally arrived . . .

And, my favorite quick-hit, pop culture memory from those heady

days of our first successes: when O.J. Simpson came down to the
set of the Fatty Girl video we were directing with Hype Williams
to promote a song on an album we were producing and a spin-off
ladies line. Video vixen Karrine Steffans was on the set dancing up
a storm, and Ludacris had a chain with handcuffs on them, and
O.J. started really getting into it, rubbing up against Karrine, putting
the handcuff necklace on, really mugging it up for our cameras. He

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started talking about how he knew handcuffs really well. (Wow!

O.J. in our video with Karrine shaking her booty on him! What a
sight!) We never used any of that footage, it was too controversial,
but I think back on it as symbolic of the weird, crazy, chaotic life we
found ourselves living when things first started popping . . .

We learned the fashion business on the fly. Were still learning. In

the beginning, all we knew was what we liked, and how to get our
clothes into the hands of the top artists, but we didnt know the first
thing about sizing, and seasons, and shipping. Norman and Bruce and
them, they had a certain expertise, and they passed what they could
on to us, but the rest of it we kind of had to figure out as we moved
along. We werent exactly on our own, but we did have to hit the
ground runningand, to be honest, we stumbled from time to time.
Lets start with sizing. One of the first things we had to figure out
was how to know how many garments to make in small, medium,
large, extra-large. The first few orders we wrote, at that first MAGIC
show, the store owners would tell us how many items they wanted
in each size, but as we kicked things up a notch we had to anticipate
our sizing needs, so we tended to skew large. That was our gut
instinct. Eventually, we hit on a formula, but we got there by trial-and-
error, and by understanding our market. When was the last time you
went down to Disney World? The people you see on line, theyre
huge, right? We tend to lose sight of that fact, moving about in
trendy, fashion-conscious, health-conscious places like New York,
Los Angeles and Miami, but most people in this country are over-
weight. Were up there. And on top of that we had to figure that
among our core demographic, the young African American male,
people liked to wear their clothes a little bigger, so we ran our sizes
accordingly. Our first couple lines, we ran from XL to 6XL. Of course,
our XLs were never a true extra-large, but even here it was all about
branding. Our thinking was, No man wants to be reminded that hes

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short or skinny or whatever. You dont want to be pointing that out by

putting itty-bitty on their shirts. So we called our smallest sizes XL
and everybody was happy.
Me personally, I would never buy a shirt marked large. Im not
a big guy, but I reach for the double XL, because I like to have a little
room to move and because it makes me feel good about myself, and
weve learned that other guys are cut the same way. Now, the flip
side to this is that white America believes that skinny is better, and
that form-fitting is better, so we might have lost a few customers
over the years with this type of sizing, but in our community size mat-
ters, so thats what we play to.
The factory end of the business was a whole other education,
because we needed all kinds of work on our items. There were but-
ton factories, and zipper factories. There was a factory where they
died the fabric, a factory where they cut the fabric, a factory where
they sewed the fabric . . . There could be as many as nine factories
involved in the making of a single garment, if you counted embroi-
dery and packing and shipping. It was a lot to track. From time to
time, wed come across a vertical factory, which meant they did
everything along one assembly line, and that of course saved us a lot
of money and hassle, but we couldnt always match our timetable to
their schedule so very often we farmed this stuff out to factories all
over the world. At any given time, there could be FUBU merchandise
being manufactured on every continent on the planet, thats how
spread out we were on this.
One of the real eye-openers when we first got into the big-time
end of this business was that we would now be sharing assembly-
line space with other clothing manufacturers. Abercrombie & Fitch,
Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci . . . turned out none of these companies
owned their own factories, so wed have to jockey for space with
these guys. The downside to this was that your line was out there for
any of your competitors to see, sometimes months before you were

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ready to take it to the trade, so your designs were sometimes up for

grabs. A lot of times, wed visit one of our factories and notice a com-
petitors garment we thought might work well with our overall line,
and wed borrow some elements from it and make it our own, and of
course we had to assume that the other guys would do the same if
they saw something of ours they happened to like.
When you have no control over who eye-balls your product like
that, its tough to guard against counterfeiters and knock-off manu-
facturers, and thats a whole double-edged sword. On the one hand,
youre flattered to have a line thats popular enough to be knocked-off,
but it can come back to bite you in a lot of different ways. It can cut
into sales of your own product, naturally, but it can also undermine
your brand if the knock-off items are of inferior quality. A lot of times,
youll send an item out to a factory with an order of 100,000 pieces,
and theyll overrun an extra 100,000 pieces and somehow slip those
pieces out the backdoor. Then you have these guys who bring in any
and all kinds of t-shirts, and simply stamp them with whatever
designer logos are in that season. The majority of this counterfeit stuff
never makes it into Macys or Foot Locker, but you will see it in some
of the smaller boutiques, alongside legitimate goods, and as often as
not the store owner will have no idea hes carrying knock-offs.
Early on, I took the view that these counterfeit sales didnt necessar-
ily come off FUBUs bottom line, because most of the people who
bought these knock-off items on the cheap would never have bought our
legitimate, full-price items in the first place. Thats how I spun it in my
own head. Maybe they werent shopping in the stores that carried our
line, or maybe they couldnt afford our prices, so I tried to put a positive
spin on it. I tried to remind myself that each time someone put on the
FUBU namewhether it was embroidered onto one of our garments or
silk-screened onto a knock-offthey were in one way or another advanc-
ing the FUBU brand. They were getting our name out there.
You had to make something positive out of a negative, you know.

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Even so, weve tried to bust-up a couple big counterfeit operations

over the years, with varying degrees of success. About a year or two
after we got our deal, we worked with some New York City police
detectives to raid one of the more prominent buildings in the knock-off
district on Seventh Avenue, running from 23rd Street to 30th Street,
right around the corner from our offices in the Empire State Building.
Now, every street vendor in the city knows these buildings. Thats
where they get their pocketbooks and wallets and books and t-shirts
and whatever it is they think they can sell out of a duffel bag, or off a
folded-up bridge table. I used to go to the knock-off district myself to
buy blanks, first couple times I printed up t-shirts to sell outside the
Coliseum Mall. These buildings are open to the public, but there are no
signs out front, and the stuff is kind of laid out haphazardly in the
offices upstairs, so you have to know what youre looking for.
Wed been trying to get the cops down there for months, and
when a couple buddies on the force finally agreed to check it out with
us we rented two big U-Haul vans and an 18-wheeler and parked
them outside. It wasnt exactly what youd call a formal investigation.
Yeah, the guys we had with us were cops, but me and my boys were
also on the scene. We went upstairs and found the FUBU goods and
started loading up boxes to take down to the truck. One of the cops
said they were confiscating the unauthorized merchandise and pro-
duced a piece of paper the owner of the operation was meant to sign.
Then a purse belonging to one of the counterfeiters went missing, and
things spiraled into ugly right after that. It ended up being a huge mob
scene. A lot of people got hurt that daysome of the cops, and even
Keith. There were hundreds of people in the streets. The raid made
the newsbut in the end it didnt make much of a dent in the coun-
terfeit operation, and ever since weve learned to grin and bear it, in
regard to the knock-offs. Its a fact of life in the garment industry, and
if we spent all our time trying to clean out the counterfeiters, we
wouldnt have time to design and market our next line, so the trick

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came in staying one step ahead of these guys, and working only with
factories we could trust, where our goods would be protected.

>> DO YOUR HOMEWORK

The surest way to mess up a meeting is to come

in unprepared. Guts and instinct are fine, but theres
a lot to be said for due diligence and common sense.
Dont find too much of either in the nine-to-five
world, Im afraid. Heres an example: two middle-
aged guys came in to make a marketing pitch for
our line. They happened to be white. They appar-
ently made a great presentation to Norman
Weisfeld, who was interviewing a lot of potential
advertising guys for us to consider, and who then
arranged for me and our president of marketing
Leslie Short to meet with some of his strongest
candidates. Everyone was hanging outside our con-
ference room, waiting for the meeting to start,
when I bounced in at some point wearing a
$100,000 bracelet on one wrist, and a Rolex on my
other wrist, and probably a nice gold chain around
my neck. Dont know what else I was wearing, but it
was probably a pair of jeans. Definitely, not a suit.
I was like a lot of guys from my neighborhood
when they first make it big, wearing my money and
not buying in to the conventions of the corporate
workplace. One of the middle-aged white guys took
one look at me, and his jaw dropped. He said,
Wow! Whats your position around here? Then he
said, Whatever it is, theyre paying you too much!

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He was just goofing, I imagine, but he missed the

mark. His partner put his face in his hands. He
knew they were screwed. He knew things had been
going well but that theyd just blown their pitch. I
wasnt mad or anything, but I couldnt have this idiot
doing any work for me. I mean, thats how much of
a disconnect he had, to not even know who the
CEO was of the company he was pitching, especially
at a time when I was on television a couple dozen
times each week. To have no idea of the culture of
the place, to go off like that razzing a brother about
his bling . . . these were not good things.
I flashed Leslie Short a look that meant, This
guy has got to go. She knew it was coming. I didnt
even have the patience to talk to this idiot, after that
kind of start, so I figured she could do it for me. And
she did. She said, Obviously, you have no idea who
that just was. That was Daymond John. Hes the
president and CEO of FUBU, not the white guy you
were just talking to. You need to get out of here.
Plain and simple and straight to the pointand that
point being that you need to figure a couple things
out before you put your foot in your mouth.

The other big part of our education, after figuring how to deal with
manufacturers and counterfeiters, was learning how to stay ahead of
the industry seasons. This one caught me a little bit by surprise, and
even today, all these years into it, I still have to look at a calendar to
remind myself what season were working on. Ill walk you through
it and youll get what I mean. Lets say its March 1st. The biggest

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date coming up on your calendar is the next MAGIC show, which is

coming up in August, where youll be showing your line that will hit
stores the following spring. Thats over a full year away, so we really
had to start getting out in front and thinking long-term.
During our first couple selling seasons, when FUBU was on the
rise, we would have as many as 15 designers working in our New
York officecoming up with the designs, the styles, the bodies, the
fabrics . . . putting everything on paper. By April, wed start sending
out packages to vendors for bids. These packages would include a
computer animated drawing (or, CAD) of what the piece was meant
to look like, along with all the materials necessary to make up some
samples. All the details go right into that package: how long is the zip-
per, how long is the crotch, how much we expected to charge for the
garment . . . everything.
About a month later, wed start getting back our first samples.
One garment at a time. But remember, wed given out over a hun-
dred packages, because each season we design far more items than
we expect to put into production, so by the middle of June weve
made our adjustments and gotten back our second samples from
these various manufacturers, and then as we turn the corner into July
we put some of our own people to work on some of the finishing
touchessewing the buttons, doing the embroidery, whatever else
the design calls for at that point.
Late July or so, we might start to show some of these samples
to buyers who come in to our New York showroom, ahead of the
MAGIC show, but its out in Vegas where we expect to do most of
our selling. A lot of times, well kill a line if it doesnt get a good
response at the trade show. A lot of times, a piece might get a luke-
warm response at MAGIC but we go ahead with it anyway and it sells
through the roof, so you never know. On average, if we take a hun-
dred pieces out to MAGIC, we might kill 20-30 percent of the line,
just based on the initial response wed get from the buyers.

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Over time, weve learned that different colors tend to do well for
us at different times of the year. This ones kind of obvious, but we
werent always up to speed on obvious. Black sells well no matter
what. In Spring, we do a lot of whites, a lot of softer colors like lime
and light blue, a lot of traditional colors like navy. In Fall, we might do
more oranges, or greens. Common sense stuff, but like I said, we
didnt have too much of that going in.
After the August MAGIC show, most of us make a bee-line for
Europe, to try to get a jump-start on our next line, and for the first
couple seasons this was really the biggest adjustment. With Alliance
Worldwide on board, we now had people back in New York who
could worry about filling all these new MAGIC orders, while me and
my boys could turn our attention to our next line. Used to be, wed
have to skip a season in order to service all our accounts, but all of a
sudden we could be fashion-forward. We could try to get a jump on
the next big thing before the last big thing even hit stores.

>> THEY WORK HARD FOR YOUR MONEY

A couple years into it, everything was popping.

Every few months, itd be Christmas all over again,
and with each distribution check came an extra
piece of certainty that we would be at this thing a
while. An extra piece of validity for a good, clear
concept that we all felt we could build on.
After a while, though, I started to notice that
there were certain people out there working
harder to knock us down and take our money than
we were working to build ourselves up and make
our money. Best (or, worst) example of this was a
run-in I had with a fairly well known interior decorator.

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Shed decorated for a boatload of famous, success-

ful people. Rappers, record executives, Hollywood
types . . . She came highly recommended. But then
I put her to work decorating one of my houses and
to this day almost five years later I have nothing to
show for it beyond litigation papers, after spending
a couple hundred thousand dollars. I didnt even see
a couch or a lamp. And I got to thinking, Okay, so
thats human nature for you. Youve got one group
of people working hard to make something out of
nothing, and then youve got another group working
just as hard trying to profit off you, to chip away at
what youve worked so hard to build. There are
people looking to cut you down at every turn, trying
to steal from you, hatching frivolous lawsuits, white-
collar thieves who come up with ways to get you for
more than a million dollars worth of apparel . . . and
we cant touch any of them. You know, its easier for
me to get a kid arrested for snatching five shirts
from our showroom than it is to prosecute an
employee who fudges numbers, or to go after a fac-
tory owner who over-runs our product and sells
the surplus on the side.
Too often, thats the way of it, especially in the
hood. We want what we want, we reach for what
we can, and we begrudge each other successes we
cant quite make our own. We also look for short-
cuts to our own pots of gold at the ends of our
own rainbows. But there aint no short-cuts.

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 SHIFT

The world is changing. The best golfer is black.

The tallest basketball player is Chinese. One of the illest rappers is
whiteand, incredibly, the highest percentage of rap music down-
loads and CD purchases are made by white females between the
ages of 16-25.
Let me tell you, its harder and harder to recognize the world we
actually live in up against the one we still imagine. And the mash-up
reaches into every aspect of our popular culture: Lee Iacocca does a
series of high-profile Chrysler commercials with Snoop Doggy Dog;
Websters dictionary makes room for street terms like crunk, hoody and
Benjamins; the Academy Award for best song goes to Its Hard Out
Here for a Pimp, by the rap group Three 6 Mafia; and the blockbuster
Matrix franchise breaks through with a mostly black cast and some-
how avoids being labeled and marketed as a black movie. For the
first time, its okay for people from all backgrounds to look, dress and
aspire to be black. You see it more and more. In Japan, for example,
some kids walk about in black face as form of respect or admiration.

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Like it or not, there are all kinds of fish in the mainstream these
days, but its not just that the individual players are changing on us.
Its not just that weve become more open and accepting and toler-
ant. Its not just that white kids want to be black, and black kids are
grabbing onto traditional white brands in bigger numbers than ever
before. And its not just that the exceptions to the rule have taken
hold. No, the rules themselves have gone out the window. Were
back to making it up as we go along. Weve gone from three televi-
sion networks to three hundred, from a half-dozen outlets for a viable
print ad campaign to a couple dozen more besides. Weve gone from
one national channel for music videos to hundreds of network and
local stations that regularly air music programmingnot to mention
the all-night, all-over play some of these videos get on the club scene.
Weve gone from traditional wire services like AP and UPI, to niche
wire services like Urban Wireless, All Hip-Hop and Sister-to-Sister, up-
to-the-minute news organizations that keep our community wired to
the latest trends and developments. And weve gone electronic: all
of a sudden, the Internet allows for all kinds of back-and-forth, on-
demand, real-time interactions with consumers through a direct link
into their homes, creating an intimate kind of give and take that
would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. This right here has
marked the fundamental shift of our generation, for the way it forever
changed how contentmusic, videos, movies, television shows,
books, even commercialsgets into the hands of consumers.
The stakes have changed as well. Used to be a 30-second spot
on BET would cost us about $1,500. This was back in 1998, when
most young black kids in America watched BET, but the rates were
so low because there werent any black families with Nielsen boxes
in their homes, so the networks numbers hardly registered; really, if
you went to any of the projects, in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los
Angeles, you wouldnt find one Nielsen box, which for FUBU meant
we could blanket that network for a year for about $1 million. This

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was huge for us, because BET was like CNN to urban America; its
where we turned for insight and information on everything from pol-
itics and business, to clothes and cars and fashion. I mean, we would
own BET for that $1 million, running our spots ten, fifteen, twenty
times a day. Wed usually have about three commercials in rotation,
and it was a real bonus for us. It got to where you couldnt sit down
to watch that channel without seeing one of our ads. At one point,
when I was deep into it and doing a lot of traveling overseas, my wife
said she saw me more on television, on BET, than she did at home,
and she wasnt exaggerating.
Today, of course, that market is once again out of reach for an
upstart company like FUBU. BET has been bought by Viacom, and its
30-second ad rates are now over $6,000, but its still a steal. Even so,
there are so many channels, so many viewing options that every-
things diluted. Now you have to be Coke or Apple or Ford to be able
to afford the kind of wall-to-wall campaign we put out when we were
getting off the ground, but even if you could afford to cough up the
money youd see the penetration is not the same. With TiVO and dig-
ital and satellite television, its easier than ever before for viewers to
zap through commercials, so half the time theyre not even watching
the commercial. And satellite radio networks dont even carry com-
mercials, so that medium is out entirely.
Its hard to know where to spend your ad dollars, if you should
even spend them at all. If youre a small company the only way to
make the kind of hit we managed is to align with various artists and
make your own programming, which is now called branded entertain-
ment. Youve got to go at it like we did, only harder. Now you have to
place your product in movies, DVDs, television shows, music videos.
You have to get product mentions in books, in songs, on television
talk shows, in magazine articles. But at the same time you have to
be subtle about it. Theres a song out as I write this called Vans,
by the rap group The Pack, and the accompanying video was such a

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blatant plug for the Vans line of skateboarder shoes and clothes you
couldnt tell if you were watching a commercial or a music video. In
fact, MTV refused to run the video, it was such a shameless tie-in, so
there has to be some artistry to it, some flavor. You have to sign on
artists, like we did with LL Cool J, and let them carry your flag and
build a campaignwearing your stuff in their videos, talking about it
in their songs, showing up on Leno in one of your new shirts, really
owning your brand in their personal life as well as in their professional
life, because thats what young people respond to. They can tell
when a star is keeping it real. The consumer knows the drill. They
know when you run a commercial the star is getting an endorsement
fee, but when he wears it in his private life, the consumer thinks,
Hey, this guy can afford to wear anything he wants in the world, and
this is what he chooses. Thats bigger than any commercial.
Absolutely, you can still break into the marketplace, but the
waters of the mainstream have gotten a little more treacherous in the
decade or so since we launched our line. You have to hustle, same
as always, only more so.

>> BLACK ON BLACK

The annual buying power of African-Americans is

more than $680 billion. Thats an enormous number,
for a market that is typically overlooked. Most of that
money goes to housing ($110 billion), food ($53.8
billion), cars and trucks ($28.7 billion), clothing ($22
billion) and health care ($17.9 billion), and that closely
parallels the spending in our general population since
they cover our basic needs.
In the African-American community, we probably
spend a disproportionate amount on electronics

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and jewelry (and champagne!), but a lot of these are

cash transactions and difficult to track, so meaning-
ful figures are unavailable to us on this one. But the
really interesting number to me is that we only
spend six percent of our money within the black
community. Six percent! A lot of people get all hot,
when they see a low number like that, but when I
break it down I start to think, Its no wonder. Its
not like there are any black-owned car companies.
Yeah, there are a mess of black-owned dealerships,
but that money goes back to Ford or Volkswagon
or Toyota, so it doesnt fully count. There might be
black doctors, but there are no black hospitals, and
last I checked there are no black-owned health
insurance companies. Black real estate developers?
Probably, but people buy homes based on commu-
nities and schools and amenities that have nothing
to do with the color of the builders skin.
My personal take on this is I dont pay too much
attention to it. I think about it then set it aside. Ill
spend my money within the community if I can, if it
makes sense, but basically Ill buy what I need,
whenever and wherever I need it, as long as its rea-
sonably priced. You cant go crazy, trying to keep
your money in the black community, because youll
just end up keeping it in your pocket. You go to the
car wash, its run by a white guy. You go to the deli,
its run by a Korean guy. Order a pizza, its the
Italian guy. Your head can explode, second-guessing
every purchasing decision.

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My professional take, from a marketing per-

spective, is that theres a need to be filled in many
industries, and that there are African-Americans
looking to spend their money on African-American
products, if only they could find them. Theres no
such thing as an urban line of frozen foods, but
maybe there should be. Think about it. Most blacks
and Hispanics do their shopping at the local bodega.
We dont always have a big Stop n Shop in the
neighborhood, especially in our inner cities, so our
choices are limited. But if Sara Lee or Stouffers
decided to market a B. Smith line of frozen foods,
or Fat Joes meat loaf, or whatever, people would
definitely buy it. You know, some kid comes in to the
store, he wants something to eat, he likes Fat Joe,
he checks out the packaging, hell definitely buy it.
And the people who dont even care about Fat
Joe, theyll buy it just because its a good product.
Studies show that African-Americans like to buy
black when it authenticates what theyre buying,
when it puts some sort of stamp on it. Thats the
case across the board. If youre looking at fine
apparel, for example, like a really nice suit, youll
still want to buy Italian. High-end electronics, youll
probably buy a Japanese product. Cars, maybe
German. But why would I want to buy an MP3 player
from a black manufacturer? Whats the advantage?
I definitely dont want to buy black pizza, and I dont
want to buy black Chinese food. I want to buy it
from a Chinese guy.

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The same gap I saw for FUBU in the apparel

world is the gap I now see for hundreds of differ-
ent companies and brands, managed by people
who need to think outside the box a little bit. It
takes vision and guts and faith and all those good
things, to recognize the buying power of the
African-American community and discover new
ways to tap into it. And it takes the shared vision
of a partner with the money and resources to help
you see it through. If you think its crazy, remem-
ber that Samsung was the 8th largest company in
the world, with annual sales over $80 billion, when
they hooked up with four little black boys from
Queens, and to date we have shipped over $5 bil-
lion. Thats buying powerand selling power.
African-Americans, when were making any kind
of significant purchase, were aspiring to some-
thing. Were buying into an ideal we have for our-
selves, and we want to know were getting the best
our money can buy. Its a statement. All purchases
are statement purchases, if its not to cover a
basic need, and this is especially true for African-
Americans. They say we wear our wealth on our
sleeves, and its true. We absolutely do. Its a
respect thing. But its also a self-respect thing,
which means we need to stop beating ourselves up
over this and making each and every purchase as
if the health of our community depended on it.
Some of us, we just want to know we got a good
deal. End of story.

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The time when manufacturers and marketers could pimp their

way around the marketplace and dictate to the crowd is long gone.
Now the power has shifted. Now the crowd dictates to the manufac-
turer, and the business of buying and selling has been tilted every which
waymost of which cross all cultural lines and break every known bar-
rier to entry in most consumer-based industries. Theres no more, Make
it and they will come. The consumer drives the product, and I take this
as a great good thing. It makes it an exciting time to be marketing goods
and services to the American consumer, and at FUBU I think weve
done well to stay out in front of these changes. Anyway, weve meant
to. Are we market visionaries? Not at all. Do we get it right every time
out? No way. Hell, weve messed up more times than I can remember,
and misread our market in ways that cost us a lot of money, but for
the most part weve kept in step with our core consumer.
The main thing is, weve tried to bend and tilt with the times.
Thats been our mission ever since we opened up shop. I tend to date
our success at FUBU back to those very first tie-top hats, Easter
weekend, 1991, so weve been at this a good long while, which
means theres been a lot of bending and tilting. Weve seen our ini-
tial target market age out of our initial line, but weve aged right
alongside, to where we now offer all kinds of products that carry the
FUBU name. Some of them we make ourselves, and some of them
we license out, to extend our reach. At FUBU, we were never just
about t-shirts and tie-top hats, but over the years, thanks to the brand-
extending power of various licensing deals, weve been about shoes,
boots, bags, lingerie, hair care products, formal wear, watches, fra-
grances, eyewear, a childrens line, a womens line, and on and on.
Honestly, I never gave any of these licensing opportunities a
thought when we were starting out. It was so far from my thinking I
didnt even know such opportunities existed. But I came to realize its
like found money, and a great way to grow your brand without bust-
ing your butt. If some company wanted to do business with us, if

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they wanted to capitalize on our successful brand and the market

penetration that presumably came along with it, then we were all for
it. If you came to us with a reasonable plan, one that didnt poach on
our core business or cheapen the FUBU name, and if it seemed to us
you could deliver on it, there was a good chance wed sign on and
see what happened. What did we have to lose, right? We took the
same approach as we expanded into free-standing storefront opera-
tions, in the United States and abroad. If it made sense, we went for
it; if it seemed like a stretch, we let it go.
Its hit-or-miss with these tie-ins, and it changes each season. For
example, our watch company partners went out of business right
after they launched our line. We signed R. Kelly to do a gorgeous
campaign to promote our new fragrance line, and then had to scrap
the whole thing when we learned he was about to be investigated on
criminal charges. Sometimes, the companies we were doing busi-
ness with couldnt make good on payments due us, and we had to
take legal action to collect our fair share. Sometimes, they underesti-
mated demand and couldnt make good on their orders, leaving the
FUBU name a little bit tarnished by association. There were even
some growing pains with Jordache, the company that made the first
designer jeans, which put out our womens line, as we figured
how to take some of the hard edges of the FUBU look and soften
them up for the fairer sex. Turned out our Jordache partners knew
their stuff, and they ended up teaching us a few things about the
industryreminding me yet again that you should never be so arro-
gant or full of yourself to think you know it all, even when youre rid-
ing high. (Especially when youre riding high!)
But we had our share of positive associations as well. Thanks to
our free-standing stores in these markets, FUBU became the number
one selling brand in Korea and France. Were even in Saudi Arabia, of
all places. One year, we had the best-selling line of bedding at Bed,
Bath & Beyond, and one of the top selling tuxedos in the country, so

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you never know when one of these things is really going to take off
and when it does, its good news all around. Good for the licensee.
Good for the licensor. Good, even for our flagship customers,
because it contributes to our bottom line and allows us to keep costs
down in other areas.

>> SMELLS LIKE HIP-HOP

A word or two on our aborted attempt to get

into the fragrance business. Russell Simmons had
tried to penetrate this market about a year ahead
of FUBU, and he met big resistance from retailers
who kept telling him they didnt buy hip-hop fra-
grances. Dont know how you can smell hip-hop, but
this was the reception he received. Still, he went
ahead and created a beautiful bottle and a nice fra-
grance, only there were some problems with the
design. The bottles tended to break in shipping,
which was about the last thing he needed when he
was launching a new line. Hed already been met
with all this resistance, and once he started having
trouble with the packaging he was derailed.
We stepped in the following year with a fra-
grance of our own, Plush, and the resistance was
still there. We were working with an established
fragrance company, but still we kept hearing,
Were not gonna let you guys into the fragrance
market. And now they could point to their bad
experience with Russell as one of their reasons.
After all, it stood to reason to these retailers that
if one hip-hop fragrance had some trouble then

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another would be in line for more of the same. But

we went ahead with our plans, and developed a nice
fragrance and some compelling packaging. We
were good to go. We shot a beautiful ad campaign
with R. Kelly and Rosalyn Sanchez, but we never
got to run those ads because of that looming R.
Kelly controversy. We had to eat that whole shoot.
Nevertheless, we sent the fragrance out to a
couple stores and started to do really well with it,
even without a supporting ad campaign, but after
a while sales started to flattenprimarily because
most retailers felt the product wasnt right for
them at the moment. Plush was meant to evoke a
certain level of success, and comfort, and accom-
plishment. That was the idea behind the campaign
we never got to run. But there was still the
notion out there that a black or hip-hop fragrance
wouldnt work, and ultimately we had to pull the
plug on the project because we werent getting
anywhere with it.
But the reach and power of the mavens of the
urban market is like the bird flu, Ive come to real-
ize. Youve got all these designers and manufactur-
ers trying to figure out that virus, trying to get
into the human strain, and these efforts are
regenerating and gaining strength and power and
momentum, and sooner or later someone will
come in and unlock that market and the virus will
spread like crazy. In the end, thats what happened
here. My boy Puffy came out with a fragrance

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called Unforgivable, and it ended up as the num-

ber one selling fragrance in history. And this was
just three years after Russell Simmons got all that
flack about people not wanting to buy a hip-hop fra-
grance. Russell took his swing at it. We took our
swing at it. And then finally Puffy knocked it down.
Now the doors are wide open.

One of the great things about our success with FUBU was that
people took notice. Wasnt just our licensing partners. Wasnt just
that each season we managed to sell through our lines and generate
enough heat to carry us over into the next season. Wasnt just that
we somehow managed to build FUBU into a lifestyle brand, a line
that seemed to symbolize a certain kind of success, a certain way of
expressing yourself, a certain way of looking back at the world. We
werent the first urban designers on the scene, and as long as Im on
it let me just say that Ive often cringed at the label, even though I
use it myself. Exactly what makes our clothes urban? Is it that black
people are wearing them? We used to wear Timberlands and Le Coq
Sportif, but nobody ever called them urban lines. Is it because were
designing them? There were black designers at Adidas and Polo, but
they were working behind the scenes. Is it because were black-
owned? I guess this has to be it, even though there were black-
owned companies in other industries that never had to shoulder the
term. I mean, can you imagine a black defense attorney going part-
ners with another black defense attorney and having some reporter
label their practice urban? Even worse, hip-hop?
Whatever you called us, we pioneered a whole segment of the
fashion industry, and our sales soared. With each monetary success
there was also a tremendous sense of validation, which we could

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measure by the line forming of people wanting to pick our brains.

Early on, I started getting all kinds of phone calls, from this and that
corporate executive, wanting to know if I could help him or her tap
into the youth market in their arena. Not to blow smoke up my own
butt or anything, but I became a fairly sought after consultant in cer-
tain circles, because there werent many other entrepreneurs or
executives as in touch with the urban market. White companies,
black companies . . . every-color-of-the-rainbow companies. They
could see that we were plugged in to our consumer in ways they
couldnt imagine, so they reached out. I even went out on the speak-
ing circuit, appearing at colleges like Brandeis University, and before
venture capitalist conventions and large corporations, speaking about
the power of the urban market.
This got to be a fairly interesting side job for the way it introduced
me to any number of new opportunities. At one point, I met Larry
Miller, who was the head guy at Brand Jordan, over at Nike. We
ended up becoming good friends, but at the time I guess you could
say we were in play. We were talking to a lot of people, about all
kinds of deals and associations, and in the back of my head I was
thinking there might be a way to bring me and my boys onto the Nike
campus and extend our penetration through their marketing. At least
it was worth a conversation, so Larry invited me to an executive con-
ference he was running in New York, with about twenty of his top
people, and I gave them my two cents on what I thought Nike was
doing right in the marketplace, and where they were coming up short.
Now, I had to have been pretty full of myself to tell a company
like Nike what they should be doing, because the truth of the matter
is theyve got it on lock. Hands down, theyre the number one com-
pany on the planet in terms of branding and imaging, but in my opin-
ion theyve got too much attention focused in just one area. Sports,
thats their main thing, and my take is, if they can make $15 billion by
associating their brand with athletes, maybe they can push it to $18

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or $19 billion if they sign on a select group of actors, musicians,

designers, businessmen . . . people who represent something mean-
ingful to potential customers who arent looking to athletes as role
models, people who arent athletes themselves. After all, dont they
just do it as well? Nike sells tons of merchandise to people who
havent broken a sweat since high schoolwalking-around shoes,
comfortable sweats and training suits, whatever the case may be.
Call it lifestyle clothing, or freestyle clothing, or whatever you want,
but its a different market than their athletic clothing, a whole differ-
ent deal. Wouldnt it make sense to sign a musical artist, and let his
or her star power rub off on the Nike swoosh, so that all these non-
athletes might have someone to emulate?
This one meeting with Larry and his group went so well he invited
me out to the Nike complex to present to the companys top brass.
Their headquarters were just incredible. Swimming pools, tennis
courts, tracks, full gyms . . . it was almost like a college campus,
except a couple times bigger. I was told that at any time of day Nike
employees could leave their desks to go work out, and I thought,
What a way to run a company! But it works. It seemed like every top
executive short of Phil Knight himself was in the room to hear my
pitch, and I went at it again. I explained how they needed to think out-
side the sports box, and pay attention to what some of their competi-
tors were doing, like the people over at Reebok. Reebok had been
dead-in-the-water just a couple years earlier, and then they signed Jay-
Z and 50 Cent and all these other artists, and their market share
started to climb. These guys werent just endorsing the brandthey
had their own shoes, their own clothing line, whatever. And you could
chart the spike in Reeboks sales and draw a direct line to this push in
entertainment. I told these Nike guys there are only so many Michael
Jordans, only so many Tiger Woodses. These kinds of superstar ath-
letes come around only once a generation. But in the entertainment
world, there are dozens and dozens of artists who receive the same

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kind of adulation and respect from their fans, whose endorsement

could translate to sales, as long as that artist remained hot.
I broke it down. I said, Michael Jordan is one player. He might
be the focus, the center of attention in the games he plays, but hes
not the only player people are looking at. Hes on a court with nine
other guys, for about two hours, about 80 nights a year. His games
are broadcast on a specific channel, written up in a specific section
of the paper, and for about half the year you dont see him at all. And
if you dont care about basketball, you can miss out on his comings
and goings entirely.
Then I compared the reach of a guy like Jordan to someone like
Jay-Z. I said, When Jay-Z gives a concert, hes the only guy on the
court. Everyone is just looking at him. His videos run three and a half
minutes, but theyre played over and over, on MTV, BET, VH1,
MuchMusic and dozens of other channels. Theyre played in clubs.
And his songs reinforce those images from his videos every time
theyre played on the radio. Even if you dont buy his albums, or go out
to the clubs, or watch music video channels, its hard to escape his
music. Its in the air, and all around. And hes not just about one thing,
like basketball. Hes all over the place. Hes dictating to kids his opin-
ions on various matters, the type of lifestyle they should be pursuing,
what they should be wearing, drinking, eating, driving, whatever. If he
talks about a new style or a product in one of his songs, its validated
in the minds of millions of his fans. If he wears a hot new line of
clothes in one of his videos, its like the ultimate product placement.

>> THE NIGGA THIS YEAR

I have a theory, and Ive tried to work against it

as Ive attempted to grow our brand. It goes like
this: theres only enough room for one black guy at

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a time. I dont buy it, and I certainly dont like it, but
historically thats how its goneat least thats how
its gone in the fashion business. When youre com-
ing up, youll get your shot. Youll get some floor
space and sell some pieces. Youll be the token black
guy for a while, but as soon as youre out of style
theyll make way for the next guy. Its like its a one-
at-a-time deal, and were supposed to take turns.
My boy Keith Clinkscale, when he was president
of Vibe magazine, used to tell me hed get calls at
least once a week from haters wanting him to do
a story on FUBU because they heard we werent
black-owned. Or maybe the calls came from our
competition, wanting to put salt in our game for
whatever reason. Its almost funny, the reports we
heard from media-types like Keith, that people
were calling us JEW-BU instead of FUBU, because
of our association with the Weisfeld family.
People were lining up to cut us down. You dont
see that in other industries. Go to the jewelry dis-
trict, on 47th Street. Youve got all these guys
working together, in unity, supporting each other.
If one of them does well, they all do well, because
theres a spillover effect. But if the Nigga This
Year is only given this one little area in the depart-
ment store, if youre the only line there, if you dont
have a bunch of supporting lines to create a whole
urban or streetwear department, youll be out of
that store the next season. Thats why Ive tried to
embrace all these other lines that have launched in

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FUBUs wake. Jay-Zs RocaWear. Puffys Sean

Jean. Russell Simmonss Phat Farm. As one does
well, we all do well. Across the board. A lot of
people think Im crazy, to help these guys and sup-
port them when theyre trying to compete for my
business, but I believe it keeps us out in front.
These are the type of people, youre not about to
keep them from being successful. You can help
them or not, but you cant stand in their way.

Back to my Nike visit and the cross-over power of some of these

entertainment artists. Theyre covered in countless newspapers and
magazines and on-line zines, and not just in one section like the
sports section. Theyre working every day of the year, not just six
months. They might come up as a rapper, but soon enough theyre
actors, and producers, and music video directors. Theyre everywhere.
Theyre promoting a new album, or an upcoming concert, or a new
video, not to mention the coverage you get from the albums, concerts
and videos themselves. Really, theres a kind of wall-to-wall exposure
that can be far greater than what they could get out of a single Michael
Jordantaking nothing away from MJ, whos the greatest. A rapper
with a hot new single, hes getting six to seven thousand spins each
week on radio stations across the country. Even a halfway decent song
gets three to four thousand spins, and if its a hit . . . well, then you can
just forget about it. Our kids will be singing a Jay-Z song for the next
five years, reinforcing whatever brand hes associated with each time
out, and he puts out three or four singles per album, so it all adds up.
I said, Its great to go out and sign the Super Bowl MVP, but who
will even remember this guy when the next football season rolls
around? Plus, theres only one Super Bowl MVP, right? There are

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dozens and dozens of hot new artists each season. That makes it
easier to sign any given one of them, at a price that makes sense.
At the time of our meeting on the Nike campus, Reebok was on
its way up, making its push, and I told these guys to keep their eyes
on them. Turned out Adidas was watching, too, because they ended
up buying Reebok the following year, for $3.8 billionmaking them
the second-largest shoe company in the world and slowly creeping
up on Nike. I hadnt been encouraging these Nike guys to break their
mold, or even to look over their shoulders and pay attention to their
competition. I mean, theyd had ridiculous success, doing what they
were doing, and I had no doubt they would continue having that
ridiculous success. But I was suggesting that they expand that mold
a little bit. If they put out a thousand styles of shoes each year, why
not have fifty lifestyle shoes, aligned with certain artists? Why not
dip their toes into these waters and gauge the temperature? It was
all about scale, and taking retail space from their competitors.
They could have hooked up with FUBU and used our influence to
tap into the hip-hop world, but I dont think they heard me. Or maybe
they did and figured they could go this route on their own, but I had
given my opinion, and I share it here because well all do well to think
beyond whatever ceiling weve put over our heads. Going forward,
you can bet youll see companies aligning with entertainment artists
more and more. Doesnt mean theyll be signing less athletes, but
theyll start to spread those dollars around, across the pop culture
spectrum. It makes good business sense. Its a huge potential mar-
ket, when you think about all the different ways you can be bom-
barded with a hit song. How many times its played on the radio, how
many times the video is played, how many times it plays in the clubs,
or in mix-tapes, or downloads. It could be eight to ten thousand times
a week, you have some guy singing about his S.Carter shoes, and
you have to think this is way more effective than throwing in with a
single athlete, no matter how great or legendary that athlete might

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be. These artists, they wont get injured and miss a season. Theyre
a safe bet. True, the rap on some of these hip-hop guys is theyre
always getting shot, but even that can work in your favor, in terms of
brand association. I dont mean to sound harsh or flip, but Tupac sold
more albums dead than aliveover 50 million units!making him the
second-hottest selling deceased artist after Elvis, so it wont kill you.

>> HEY, HEY, HEY

Ill share a licensing story, to give some idea how

these deals usually go and to reinforce my belief
that you get back in business what you put into it.
Back in the late 1990s, there was a company
called Iceberg that had a high-end line of fine-knit
sweaters, pants and shirts with a whole mess of
licensed characters on them. Snoopy. Bart
Simpson. Like that. Some of these sweaters would
sell for $600, and I thought we could do better
with the same concept at a more affordable price
so I reached out to Bill Cosby and inquired about
the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids license, which
was all but dormant at the time. Me and my boys
had grown up on these characters, and I thought
we might tap into peoples nostalgia and do well
with them, in this context. Later on, wed branch
out to other licensed characters, like the animated
Harlem Globetrotters, but Fat Albert was our first
and most successful tie-in with these sweaters,
which we marketed under our Platinum FUBU line.
The upshot to this one is that our sweaters did
better than we could have expected, priced about

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40 percent lessand in the end Platinum FUBU

killed the Iceberg line. We also put Fat Albert back
on the map, reviving interest to where thered
soon be a live-action movie built around a line that
had basically been on the shelf. All this happened in
the stretch of three or four years, and in all that
time I never dealt with Bill Cosby personally. It was
just lawyers talking to lawyers, but we must have
sent him $10 million or so in licensing fees, and I
found it a little surprising that he didnt even send
a note of thanks. Just a note. I mean, someone
helps you earn all that money and jump-start an
asset that really wasnt doing all that much, youd
think a thank you note was in order, right? I didnt
have to license Fat Albert. I could have gone after
Underdog. Manny Jackson, the owner of the Globe-
trotters, a very respected, successful business-
man in his own right, he made some money on the
line and made it a point to come up to our offices
to thank us for the opportunity. Muhammad Ali, we
also put his likeness on some of these items, and
he made a good chunk on his end, and even he
came up in his condition to show his appreciation.
This is a man who once had the third most recog-
nizable face in the world, behind Mickey Mouse and
the Pope, so this was huge. When he left our build-
ing, and word had gotten around that he was inside,
there were hundreds of people gathered in front of
the Empire State Building, waiting for him to come
back out. And as a result of that meeting I ended

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up befriending Alis manager, Bernie Yuman, who

now acts as my manager as well.
Most businesses are built on relationships. Its
how you treat people that counts. I dont have a
beef with Bill Cosby over this, because business is
business. But Ive got to tell you, I didnt go out of
my way to keep that Fat Albert line going, once the
terms ran out. Each side had done well, but that
was the end of it, and when the dust cleared I real-
ized how important it is to show a little love in this
kind of situation. And Ive made sure ever since,
whenever somebody licenses the FUBU name, I
always call over and thank them for wanting to get
into business with us in the first place. Im very
grateful, because theyre putting money in my
pocket, and I dont care how rich or how success-
ful you are, or how deep your pockets have
become, theres always room for a little more
money in there.
Its one thing to wave your own flag, but to have
someone else put their money, their expertise and
their sweat into your dreams, in this dog-eat-dog
world . . . its an honor.

I want to go back to that One Less Shrimp analogy from a couple

chapters back, that all-important lesson I learned while I was working
at Red Lobster, about how its the little things that add up. There was
a best-selling book not too long ago that said, Dont Sweat the
Small Stuff, but for my money thats exactly what you need to do
if you mean to stand out. Its the small stuff that makes the biggest

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difference when it comes to establishing a brandand the big pic-

ture that comes into focus only after the details have been covered.
At FUBU, that meant the little things we did to make our product
stand out. We couldnt put three sleeves on our shirts but we paid
attention to details. We used the finest materials, the heaviest fab-
rics, the best zippers and buttons. We personally serviced our
accounts. We went big into embroidery, when our competitors
were still silk-screening or heat-sealing, and a lot of our highlights
were hand-sewn. These small things added up, as people came to
associate our brand with quality.
Truth is, everything you do in business adds up, just as every little
misstep can cost you. Ive tried to keep this in mind, all along. At
FUBU, for example, we never went in for those big advertising cam-
paigns, putting all our eggs in one basket, preferring instead to
spread our ad dollars around. First of all, we did all our advertising in-
house, so that was one way to keep our costs down (and to keep the
look of our company in line with our vision). But then if I had a million
dollars to spend to promote our line, Id put it to work ten times
instead of one, put it into one video, one song, one print ad, one club
campaign . . . and wed get a bigger run for our money.
Wasnt just advertising, where we played it small and close to
the vest. In areas like marketing, too, we tended to go the easiest,
most obvious route. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Thats the old buzzword
in marketing and advertisingKISSand my thing was to keep it
real simple. When it came to focus group testing, we were like the
guy who owns Arizona Iced Tea. His idea of a focus group was to
lay in his companys new products in his refrigerator at home.
Whatever drinks his kids reached for most often, thats what they
went with. We took the same approach. Wed design, design,
design, make as many samples as we could. Then wed put them
in our showroom and see which items our own people wanted to
steal from the racks. All our guys wear our clothes, and if I kept

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hearing, Daymond, I want that piece, I knew we had something

going for us.
But most CEOs dont operate in this kind of hands-on way, not
anymore. They dont think for themselves. Youve got these big
companies all split up into so many different layers, theyre insu-
lated from whats going on. Theyre afraid to take chances, even
thought thats how they got to where they are in the first place, by
taking chances. But you cant get too comfortable, too complacent.
You cant lose touch. You have to check out a guy like Rupert
Murdoch, who recently bought a big stake in MySpace, a cutting
edge portal thats hard-wired into every teenagers computer, and
remind yourself that you can never get too set in your ways. Chris
Latimer, the guy who turned me on to those hockey jerseys when
we were first getting started, whos gone on to be enormously
influential as an event planner and image consultant, he still comes
up to my office every couple months and says, Okay, Daymond,
time to get you out of your ivory tower. Were gonna go to some
clubs, and were gonna go to the hood, and were gonna hang out
and touch everybody and see where youre at. Every time Im in
the hood its a valuable lesson. It helps me to know where the nee-
dle is, and whether or not our message is getting out there the way
we want it out there. Ill go into a club, someone will spot me as
one of the FUBU guys, hell come up to me and say, Last year you
made this one piece, I loved it. I cant wait for you to do another one
like that. Or Ill hear, What the hell happened to you guys? You
made something hot last year, and this year theres nothing. Whats
wrong with you?
Either way, I love it, because it keeps me connected. Tells me
what were doing right, what were doing wrong, what we need to
fix. And it puts it out there that were still a part of the community we
mean to serve. Were not so big that we cant party with our cus-
tomersthat sounds like the Cristal guy, if you ask me.

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>> HANDS ON

Im a big fan of any corporate executive who

manages to keep in close and constant touch with
his customers, or who undertakes any initiative to
help him do so, and Ill shine a light on one here. I
was at an awards ceremony not too long ago with
David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue, which is proba-
bly one of the few airlines making any kind of money
these days. If youve ever taken one of their flights,
youll know they do things a little differently over
there. They pump up the whole travel experience,
and make it funand affordable. Its a winning for-
mula, and a real departure from the cold, imper-
sonal way the major carriers do their thing.
Anyway, JetBlue had just beaten us out as
Ernst & Youngs Entrepreneurs of the Year, and
I hung out with David Neeleman and JetBlues
President and COO David Barger at the event to
announce the awards. Wed already won the
regional award, so I didnt mind when we lost out
to JetBlue on the national award, especially to a
company that managed to make some serious
noise in an industry that has long been one of the
toughest to crack.
Neelemans secret to staying on top of his busi-
ness? Along with his colleague Barger, he makes it
a point to ride at least one of his flights each week.
Simple enough, right? And they dont just sit back
and relax and enjoy the ride. They work the ticket
counter, handle the baggage, hand out snacks,

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fluff pillows, walk the aisle and talk to customers.

In this way, these guys get to know their business
inside out and upside down. They keep in touch,
and get their hands dirty, and I have to think this
is one of the main reasons why JetBlue has given
the big boys at American Airlines, Delta and
Continental all kinds of fits in their first few years
of operation. Theyre lean and hungry and smart
enough to put themselves on the lineliterally.

I always thought there was tremendous advantage in staying

small. The small guy, the stealth guy will always find a way in to any
market. Once a company gets too big, its afraid to take chances. In
a big, lumbering corporate environment, you cant respond quickly to
a sudden change in the marketplace, or roll out a new line of clothing
to capitalize on new trend. It takes much more energy to move in a
new direction, to respond to a sudden shift, to change your stripes in
any kind of meaningful way. Thats why my friend Keith Clinkscale,
former president and CEO of Vibe magazine, talks about these giant
companies being blind-sided by their upstart competitors. The big
bookstore chains didnt see Amazon coming. Xerox didnt see Canon
coming. IBM didnt see Microsoft coming. ABC, CBS and NBC didnt
see Fox comingand for what its worth, lets remember that Fox
launched on the back of mostly black programming like Roc and
In Living Color. Nobody saw Google coming. And, in some ways,
Nike didnt see Reebok coming.
The small guys will always find a way to win, and theyll be able
to shift on the fly and adapt, and the lesson here is not just to keep
your company in fighting trim but to keep your eyes in the rear-view
mirror and your side-view mirrors and at the same time on the road

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aheadnot the easiest thing to do when youre driving a massive 18-

wheeler. Agility, thats the key. Big companies cant respond as
swiftly as their smaller competitors because there are too many lay-
ers, too much bureaucracy, and thats no way to be. Opportunities
turn up, and you have to be able to rise to meet them. Sometimes I
have to be able to get somebody to a video set in California by seven
oclock the next morning. Magazines have an open page, at a reduced
rate, and you need to be able to jump on that before they go to press.
Or maybe a store owner will call and tell you so-and-so didnt make his
delivery and you need to ship 10,000 pieces within a month to get the
order. You need to have an infrastructure in place that will allow you to
get these unexpected things done, but more than that you need
people to actually do them. At FUBU, sometimes that person will be
me. Ill hop on the plane. Ill show up on the set. If I need to, Ill order
a bunch of blank t-shirts from somewhere and send them out to a
local embroiderer to get the job done. I have to have that agility. I even
went to film school, to study what goes on during these video and
commercial shoots, so Ill know what to expect when I get there. The
bigger you are, the more cumbersome you are, the less likely youll
be able to do that. Big companies cant do that. FUBU can.
Small is the new big, especially in the fashion industry. Dont get
me wrong, big accounts are fine, and in many respects theyre nec-
essary to your overall success as a company, but when your line is
only carried at Macys, lets say, theres no interaction between the
company and the consumer. Not only that, theres a giant institu-
tiona department store chain!standing between you and any
relationship you might have with your customer. Its impersonal. The
kid working the floor doesnt feel any kind of connection to your prod-
uct. He doesnt even feel a connection to the people on the floor. He
doesnt care which items he sells, as long as he sells. But if youre
also in a boutique-type store, youve got people working for you. Its
personal. Youve got a small store owner whos plugged in to whats

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hot and new. He wants to build a level of trust with his customers, so
theyll come back to his store and look to him for advice on what to
wear, so theyll buy from him instead of from the big department
stores. He can say, Hey, check out this new line. Or, he can bury
you. He can say, Theyve gotten too big, their quality is going down-
hill, and when that happens a thousand times around the country it
can eliminate your brand. You want to cater to these guys so theyll
talk you up, and take a rooting interest in your success, almost like
they have a stake in itwhich, in a way, they do, because the more
pieces they sell the better terms we can offer on their next order,
which means therell be more money flowing their way.
I know a mother and daughter team in Florida that owns a fairly
successful Coral Gables boutique called Aura, and theyre always
telling me how important it is to have window-shoppers come in
to their store who cant really afford their merchandise, or who just
dont want to buy at the time. Its gotten so they can spot these
people a mile away, just by their body language. They dont ignore
these customers, the way some other store owners might. Instead,
they make them feel comfortable, encourage them to try on a couple
items, leave them feeling like they want to save up some money and
come back to make a purchase. Theyll talk up the hot new lines to
these people, and send them home with something to shoot for,
something to think about, and even though theres no transaction
taking place in any kind of traditional sense, its all part of business.
Its the power to see past the immediate dollar to the long-term ben-
efit, and if Im a clothing manufacturer I want someone like these
women hand-selling my pieces. And its not just at Aura, where you
find this mindset. You see it from my boy Izzy at Up Against the
Wall, and Gil at Trends, and a handful of other boutique retailers.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the so-called
mavens of the market, the people who cast themselves as helpers in
the marketplace. We all know someone like this, someone who stays

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on top of each trend, someone who knows the best place to buy the
best new clothes at the best prices. It doesnt have to be clothesit
can be housewares or antiques or electronicsbut Ill stick to what I
know. These people might not have the money to buy the clothes them-
selves, but they get a certain high from turning other people on to what
they know. They like the authority that comes with their inside insights.
They like that their friends look to them for tips on what to buy.
Gladwell suggests that these types of consumers should be
courted and encouraged to spend time in your store, and Ill take it to
the next level and suggest that when youre building a style-con-
scious, status-conscious brand you need as many window-shoppers
as you can get. Not mavens, necessarily, but just plain people who
might be your target consumer but for the fact that they dont have
the money to buy in just yet. Or maybe theyre not ready to buy just
yet. For now, these are customers in only the loosest sense, but they
just want to check you out and soak in the experience and file it away
for later. Theyre the ones wholl aspire to your line, and theyre the
ones wholl spread the word about your line to their friends and col-
leagues sooner than the customers who are actually buying the stuff.
Those high-end shoppers, the ones who can afford to buy whatever
they want, theyre not so quick to tell their friends where they got
this or that hot new outfit because they dont want their friends look-
ing just like them. They want to stand outor, to stand apart. But the
small-frys, the shrimps, the just-lookers . . . theyll talk you up. And
as soon as they have enough money in their pockets, theyll be back
to buy that piece theyve had their eye on all this time.

>> CHANGE IT UP

At FUBU, if we didnt shift with our market, wed

be on the scrap heap, but we were able to antici-

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pate the changing needs of our core consumer and

make some adjustments. Same goes for every
successful brand on the American corporate land-
scape. Look at a brand like Listerine, which started
out as a house-cleaning product. All of a sudden,
they figured out a diluted version of the stuff would
work on the germs in your mouth. They came up
with a slogan, talking about how Listerine kills
chronic halitosis, at a time when no one in the
country even knew what the term meant. Nobody
talked about bad breath. It just existed. Now, 100
years later, theyve got products that melt on your
tongue, theyve got sprays, theyve got all kinds of
different dispensers. Theyve kept reinventing
themselves, and theyre still a vibrant and viable
line, and if these guys can grow a floor cleaning
product into a mouthwash empire then brand
extension is within every companys reach. And it
should be every companys priority. A friend of
mine once told me that the only company that
doesnt need to market or refocus its line is the
U.S. Treasury Department, and I take his point.
Walk up and down any aisle in the grocery store,
and youll see versions of that Listerine transforma-
tion played out in a lot of different ways. Ketchup,
toothpaste, snack foods . . . all these companies,
building on their established brands to make sure
the consumer doesnt leave them behind. Candy
companies, like M&M Mars, coming up with all kinds
of ways to sell the same chocolate. M&M minis,

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special colors, cookies, candy bars . . . Theyve even

got M&M dolls and figurines. Theyve turned it into
a movement, and if you can do that with a fistful of
candies that melt in your mouth and not in your
hands, you can do it with anything.
Too many times, you get these CEOs behind
their big desks, counting their money, and counting
on their companys reputation to make them piles
more, but if they dont put in the time and effort
and creative energy to vitalize their brands and
keep them contemporary, theyll melt in your hands
before they get anywhere near your mouth. And if
they cant put in the time and effort themselves,
they can reach out to an outside consultant or
specialist, someone with experience in this type of
approach.
Ive tried to keep myself and my clothing brands
relevant by also changing it up. In the past, Ive
directed many of our in-house videos and commer-
cials, but Ive lately turned to directing music
artists like Fat Joe as well. I became a real student
of the form, hanging around as many video sets as
I could, to soak up what I could. And when it came
time to direct my first video, I surrounded myself
with the best. Eric White, Jesse Terrero, Dr. Teeth,
Benny Boom, Chris Robinson and of course my
childhood friend Hype Williams, the hands-down
creator of this space.
Dont be so set in your ways that you fail to rec-
ognize how a shift or a trend in another arena

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might impact your bottom line. Lets call it the

Sudoku effect. Youve seen those Japanese num-
bers puzzles, right? Theyre carried in every news-
paper in the country, and Sudoku books have been
a boon to paperback publishers and on-line game
sites that have been quick to capitalize on their
popularity. But did you know that in 2005, the
first full year the Sudoku craze was in effect in this
country, sales of Number 2 pencils increased by
over 700%. And who do you think made money on
that sideline surge? It was the savvy CEO with his
eyes open wide enough to see that all these
Sudoku nuts would need pencils to complete their
puzzles, and to make sure his factory was pre-
pared to meet the sudden demand.

The way we decided to grow at FUBU was to take on other

brands that would not cannibalize our core business. The thinking
was to establish all these different anchors for our company, and
give us every opportunity to reach out to every type of consumer.
Anchors, tent-poles, divisions . . . doesnt matter what you call
them, for us theyre really just a way to diversify our assets and
spread our costs (and risks) over several different lines, the same
way an NFL coach comes up with a bunch of different options in
the team playbook. Once we got up to a healthy level with our sig-
nature line, we started to strike distribution deals with lines like
Willie Esco, Kappa/USA and Drunken Munky. These labels had their
core followingin the Latino market, in the athletic market and
among skateboarder typesso we figured since they didnt poach
on our existing market wed do well to partnering with them.

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And we didalmost right away. In fact, we did so well with these

established lines, we soon looked to acquire another label outright.
Specifically, we looked to an Australian company called Coogi, which
had been around since 1969. Theyd hit their high-water mark in the
1980s with a colorful line of sweaters made popular by Bill Cosby on
the hit NBC series The Cosby Show. Most of their stuff sold for
about $700, and back then I didnt know too many people who
could afford to spend that much money on a single item, but the
line did well, until the mid 1990s or so when they ran out of steam.
I thought there was an opportunity here for us to establish a luxury
label to sit on top of our signature FUBU line, so we bought the
company and pumped up the name and started putting our stamp
on a whole new line aimed at our core, inner-city, trend-setting mar-
ketpeople with a little more money in their pockets to spend on
high-end pieces that might be a little more suitable to wear to work
or to a fashionable club.
We also went out and struck a partnership deal with Heatherette,
a white-hot womens line put out by the designers Richie Rich and
Traver Rains. These guys were club kids, through and through, and
they had the whole club scene wired to promote their line. Paris
Hilton, Courtney Love, Pamela Anderson, Naomi Campbell . . . they
had all these celebrities, coming and going, clamoring for their
clothes. Photographers like David LaChapelle would shoot their ads
for free, because Richie and Traver were such charismatic, interest-
ing people, and because their clothes were just hotter than hot. They
reminded me of me, the way they hustled, the way they refused to
take no for an answer, the way they courted the press and kept
plugged in to their world, the way they believed in their designs and
did whatever it took to stand out, so it was almost inevitable that we
would hook up. As it happened, we sought each other out, and both
sides knew there was a deal to be made, and now were proud to
have Heatherette as part of the FUBU family.

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The cutting edge keeps changing. Whats hot one season is cool
the next, and whats daring one year is tame twelve months later.
Someone keeps moving the line on us, and at FUBU weve tried to
anticipate those changes. Weve used these other clothing lines to
help us reposition ourselves from one season to the next, to stay
out in front, and along the way weve introduced some new lines to
reinforce what we do bestnamely, to create a kind of movie
around a clothing line, an image, and stay out of the way. Other
designers fall in love with their name, but weve taken a backseat
on these newer lines, and one of my favorite things is when some-
one comes up to me at a club wearing Coogi, saying FUBUs
wack, or FUBUs dead, and meanwhile theyre still wearing our
stuff. They dont know it, but theyre still wearing my clothes, and
I just laugh to myself. Thats what keeps us vibrant and fresh. The
brand names, they get a little stale after a while, so you need these
reinforcements.
Weve had to push the edges a bit with each new line. FUBU was
raw for its time, but the more successful we became, the more
prominent we became, the more we lost that edge. Look at it this
way: Redd Foxx was raw for his time, until Richard Pryor came
along, and he looked tame next to Eddie Murphy, who in turn looked
tame next to Dave Chappelle. You ratchet it up, each time out, but
you cant go back. You cant backpedal. Once FUBU has reached into
the middle America department stores, we cant give back that
ground, but at the same time we dont want to give up our edge, so
we keep coming out with harder and harder designs, to recast our
core customer. Just recently, weve backed a line called Ether thats
about as raw and edgy as anything on the market, and you can bet
that if we tried to get any of those items into Macys wed be shown
the door.
You have to stay out in front of demand, create new demand,
cater to your hardcore customers who look to you to help them

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determine whats hot, whats new, what they should be buying. The
people at Mercedes Benz have been able to do that by introducing
the Maybach, and the 500 and 600 series, super high-end luxury
cars that are out of reach even for most Mercedes customers. Ralph
Lauren has been able to do it, with specialty stores and couture lines
and special edition lines. Disney has been able to do it, by creating
a false sense of demand for its DVD titles, pulling them off the mar-
ket and reintroducing them several years later.
And weve tried to change it up at FUBU as wellby launching
FUBU Platinum, or repositioning the Coogi line, or just infusing a dif-
ferent kind of energy into our public image. When our early ad cam-
paign got a little tired, to give just one example, we went out and
hired the model Tyson Beckford, straight off his exclusive Polo cam-
paign. Youve all seen this guy. Hed been the ubiquitous Polo model
for years and years, and soon as he came out of that deal he signed
on with us. We had all these ad agency types telling us he might be
too closely associated with the Polo line to bring any carry-over ben-
efit to FUBU, but I never listened to these guys. (Those are the same
kind of fools who didnt even know who I was when they were in my
office!) I just liked the fact that Tyson was so closely aligned with one
of the worlds best brands, and that we had enough strength and
money and cache for him to consider coming over to work with us.
He liked our brand. He got with his manager, Beth Ann Hardison
(Kadeems mother, and one of the first supermodels back in her day)
and together they had the vision and understanding to work with us,
while we had the guts to go against conventional wisdom and make
him the face of FUBU for this one campaign.
Thats how you get and keep ahead, by following your gut. Of
course, its not just your gut that takes you to your bottom line.
There are certain established truths you have to pay attention to as
welllike, in the apparel business the only way to maintain the
exclusivity youll need to survive and thrive long-term is to have your

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own retail stores. Sooner or later, if youre in someone elses store,

theyll push you back to get that new guy in, but if you have your
own store, like Armani or The Gap, you trap people in your own
environment. You call the shots. Thats one of the reasons why
Abercrombie & Fitch has had such a resurgence in popularity over
the past several years, because theyve expanded their owned and
operated franchise stores. You go into one of these stores, its dark,
theres loud music, almost like youre walking into a club, but thats
the shopping environment theyve created to highlight their mer-
chandise, and its working, while at the same time it caters to con-
sumers at every end of the spectrum. You can go in and buy a
low-end pair of pants, or something off the sale or clearance racks,
but if youve got a little bit of money you can reach for that $500 pair
of jeans, or one of their exclusive items, and in this way the trend-
setter, tastemaker-type customer can still feel part of the brand.
Theyve broken the whole experience into tiers, and theres money
to be made at each level.
At FUBU, we could never figure this one out here at home. Yeah,
internationally, we at one point had more than 50 stores, in places like
Saudi Arabia, Australia and South Africa. (In Japan alone, there were
seven free-standing FUBU stores!) But here at home, we were never
able to make it work. We had as many as six stores in high-end out-
let malls like Woodbury Commons in upstate New York, but the num-
bers never seemed to work for us and we ended up abandoning that
end of our business. (We still maintain about 30 international loca-
tions.) I guess in the end its because were not retail guys; were not
real estate guys; were designers and marketers and trendsetters,
and it might have taken us a few false steps but we eventually real-
ized we should stick to what we knowthe care and feeding of the
FUBU brand. Its like I always say, My failures have fueled my suc-
cesses, and here it took dropping the ball a time or two before we
could run with it.

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>> THE X FACTOR

The thing about branding is it isnt etched in stone.

A brand is a mark or an image or a perception we
stamp on a product, a concept or an ideal, but it
doesnt last forever. Like anything else, it needs to be
nurtured and reinforced, or it will start to fade. Its
man-made, and it can cost millions of dollars in adver-
tising, promotion and marketing fees for a brand to
take hold. At FUBU, its our most valuable asset, and
yet for every successful brand that manages to tran-
scend the marketplace and become a part of the cul-
ture, there are hundreds that never fully catch on with
the American consumer, and hundreds more that
make a small splash before disappearing in a ripple.
Its a fluid thing, this branding business, so
much so that you can even see the same brand
mean something completely different from one
generation to the next. Take the letter X. Wasnt
that long ago that the letter stood for pornogra-
phy. There was a negative taint to it, if you said
something was X-rated. It meant it was dirty, hard-
core, subversive. To carry the tag XXX meant you
were especially dirty, hardcore, subversive. Then a
novelist named Douglas Copeland came out with a
book called Generation X, about a slacker group
of twentysomethings who came of age during the
high-tech boon, and the association started to
change. Now it wasnt quite positive, but it wasnt
entirely negative; it was somewhere in between.
Next, ESPN launched the Extreme Games in

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1995, and the meaning changed a little more. Soon,

the X stood for Xtreme, and started showing up in
a positive way on product names for deodorants,
snack food and video games. (Theres even a beauty
product known as XTreme Lashes, and a profes-
sional football team called the Los Angeles Xtreme,
which plays in the Xtreme Football Leagueor XFL.)
All of a sudden, the XXX label symbolized an extreme
taken to the extreme, and it even showed up as the
title of a 2002 action flick starring Vin Diesel.
Over time, even porn moved away from the let-
ter that was once so closely identified with the
adult film industry that they were nearly synony-
mous. The Motion Picture Association of America
dropped the X from its ratings system and began
labeling adult films NC-17, to indicate that no chil-
dren would be admitted under the age of 17. And
that Vin Diesel movie? It was released with an
MPAA rating of PG-13, just to show how far wed
moved in a couple decades.
The lesson here? X doesnt always mark the
spotbut something always will. And if you mean for
your product, concept or ideal to get and keep an
edge, you need to mark your territory with care.

If small is the new big, then maybe we should also consider that
black is the new white. Conventional, middle-of-the-road companies
have been slow to recognize the purchasing power of African-
Americans and the hip-hop community, but theyre coming around. A
couple years ago, I started keeping a clip file of endorsements and

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professional associations you would have never seen when I was a

kid, and Ill share just a few of them here to help me make my point:

BET founder Robert L. Johnson, who sold his cable network to

Viacom and used some of the proceeds to become the majority
owner of the NBAs Charlotte Bobcats franchise, forms the first
mainstream movie studio principally owned and operated by
African-Americans. The studio, Our Stories Films, aims to produce
family-friendly movies featuring primarily African-American talent
and themes and marketed to black audiences . . .

Cadillac credits its turnaround after sluggish sales in the 80s and
90s to the popularity of its Escalade SUV among rappers and other
celebrities . . .

50 Cent announces a strategic partnership with Apple Computers to

market a line of affordable home computers to the urban market . . .

Louis Vuitton signs producer/rapper Pharrell Williams to design a

new jewelry line . . .

Jay-Z partners with Hewlett-Packard for a series of ads promoting

the H-P line of personal computers . . .

TBS launches a broadband entertainment network called

GameTap, offering video games on demand, and featuring tie-in
music programming with such artists as Ice Cube, Rihanna, Da
Backwudz and Chammillionaire . . .

Queen Latifah becomes the voice of Pizza Hut, delivering the

memorable tag line, Dippin cant be denied, and almost single-
handedly revitalized the Cover Girl cosmetics line . . .

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Ralph Gilles, one of a handful of African-American car designers,

comes out with Chryslers 300C, the 2005 Car of the Year, which
becomes known as the Baby Bentley in the hood . . .

The concept of aspirational purchases has been central to a lot of

so-called urban spending. We spend money like we mean business,
like its going out of style, like we wont be around long enough to
spend through our rolls. And yet even though we spend like crazy, we
dont spend nearly as much as we claim. The rapper Jadakiss says
that rappers lie in about 80 percent of their rhymes, and Im guess-
ing thats a lowball figure. But I take his point, which suggests that all
this bling, all these fast cars and expensive clothes and luxury
houses, they all add up to the kind of image these artists want to
present. You look at these videos and you know that half the time the
house theyre living in isnt theirs. You know the car is probably on
some type of product placement loan from the car company, the
clothes come from guys like us when the label calls wanting to make
sure their artists look good, and the jewelry is borrowed from some
high-end jeweler. Its no different than when you see all these
Hollywood starlets on the red carpet at the Academy Awards, wear-
ing these ridiculous designer dresses they certainly didnt pay for, and
million-dollar necklaces theyve borrowed for the evening, so theres
nothing really new here except that rap and hip-hop bling is a little bit
louder and prouder and a little more in-your-face than what you get
with more mainstream Hollywood bling.
Of course, the downside to all of the product-placement and
branding that goes on in the hip-hop community is that it can work
against you. Every once in a while, artists can get their fans to turn
on a company because of a perceived diss to the culture, like the
Cristal/Jay-Z flap I wrote about earlier, or the racist rumors about
Tommy Hilfiger and Troop. It happens all the time. Pepsi had to do
some scrambling of its own and pledge $3 million in charity in order

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to get Russell Simmons to lift a threatened boycott after the soda

company dropped the rapper Ludacris as a spokesperson, following
negative remarks from conservative commentator Bill OReilly.
Ironically (or, stupidly), Pepsi ran a spot during the NBA All-Star game
featuring Kobe Bryant lifting weights while the Ludacris song
Welcome to Atlanta played in the background, confirming my the-
ory that none of these idiots know what theyre doing.
Also, its the artists who get caught in these lies who fall off the
charts. TLC, Toni Braxton, MC Hammer . . . there are a ton of artists
whove had big-time success and somehow ended up in bankruptcy,
and part of the reason is they were found out. I dont mean to single
out these few, because there have been dozens of falls from grace,
but these names spring to mind. Typically, the drop in sales and pop-
ularity follows the same downward trajectory. A guy can be rapping
about his Mercedes Benz, about flying here and there on his private
jet, and this and that, and then it comes out that hes living in his
mothers house in Brooklyn, in the basement. Nothing wrong with liv-
ing in your mothers house in Brooklyn, in the basement, but it
doesnt fly if youre singing about bling. Kids today, theyre not about
to listen to your lies once they know theyre lies.
I have to think this is all about to change. Theres a whole group
of rappers out there who dont dwell on these types of material
things. Theyre known as backpack rappers. Kanye West. Common.
The Roots. Mos Def. Eminem. They rap about the culture, not about
things. They might drop a brand name every once in a while, but its
usually about not having this, not having that. Theres a great line in
that Kanye West song, All Falls Down, where he talks about some
girl who couldnt afford a car so she named her daughter Alexis. (Get
it? A Lexus?)
He goes on: Then I spent 400 bucks on this, just to be like, Nigga,
you aint up on this /The people highest up got the lowest self-
esteem/The prettiest people do the ugliest things/We shine because

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they hate us, trying to buy back our 40 acres/Even if you in a Benz you
still a nigga in a coupe/We buy our way out of jail, but we cant buy
freedom/ Things we buy to cover up inside/Drug dealers buy Jordans,
crackheads buy crack, and the white man get paid off all a that . . .

>> WHOS IN YOUR EAR?

When I consult with other CEOs and corporate

leaders, one of the first things I ask is where
theyre getting their ideas. Whos advising them? Is
it their advertising agency? The people who have a
vested interest in getting them to run a big cam-
paign, because the bigger the campaign the bigger
the vig, which can run to over twenty percent?
Their brand manager? Some guy whos interested
in jobbing out the budget youve prepared for him
to vendors wholl give him Knicks tickets or smoked
hams or luxury vacations? Their Chief Marketing
Officer, who cant honestly claim to know every
aspect of every market? (Just as a side note, did
you know that the average lifespan of a CMO is 24
months?) Chances are the CMO doesnt even
know the best person to talk to in every market,
and the boss is still relying on him for some kind of
insight. An outside consultant, who works harder
to win the assignment than he will to carry it out?
I put out the question and get back a whole lot
of nothing, because the truth is, most of these guys
are surrounded at work by yes-men and sycophants
who are mostly concerned with keeping their jobs
and skimming a little off the top for themselves. So

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then I ask them about the people they work with in

their personal lives, and the answers are completely
different. Here theyre on top of it. Here theyve got
the best lawyers, the best accountants, the best
architects designing their second homes, the best
masseuses, the best doctors . . . Hell, theyve
probably got the best second-opinions lined up, to
make sure the first guy gets it right.
My point is, most successful businessmen and
women dont take the same care in their profes-
sional lives as they do in their personal lives, and if
you mean to succeed in business youve got to
make it personal. Nobody would run your business
like you, or theyd be your boss. Figure it out, if
youve inherited an executive team that cant quite
distinguish its butt from its elbow, you need to
make some changes. Figure it out, if theres some-
one outside your company whose insights youve
come to respect and admire, you might want to
bring that person on board. Figure it out, if your
kids are spending your money on this or that new
technology or product, in an area thats somewhat
related to your own, there are probably some
things you should be doing differently to redirect
some of that money your way. Come on, it doesnt
get more basic than this: your kids are taking your
hard-earned money and giving it to somebody
whos taking your space in the market. Its not just
that you dont understand your kids or what
theyre into, but youre helping your competitors.

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 shift

Youre giving them that all-important edgeand

youre putting it on your own credit card.
Start listening to the people who actually have
something to sayand tuning out the chatter that
will slow you down and run you right out of business.

Ill close out with a story that illustrates the kind of drive that has
fueled our successes in the urban market, the kind you dont often
see and cant help but admire. Doesnt matter what industry youre
talking about, relentless determination almost always rises to the top,
and in this department my boy Puffy has got it. Understand, this par-
ticular story happens to be about Puffy, but I can tell similar stories
about anybody whos put in the kind of work it takes to make it. Irv
Gotti. Fat Joe. Chris Lighty. Steve Stoute. LL Cool J. Russell Simmons.
Fabolous. Dr. Dre. Pharrell. Hype Williams. Jamie Foxx. Shakim and
Queen Latifah. Ja Rule. Mary J. Blige. Kedar Massenburg. Kevin Lyles.
And on and on. Could even be about me and my FUBU partners. You
always hear comments about how artists and industry heads run
around getting high and shooting each other, but Ive met many busi-
ness tycoons from all different industries and few rival the drive,
determination and focus youll see on this list, and across our market.
Okay, so heres the story: Puffy invited me out to Los Angeles to
go to the Oscars. It was 1998, the year Titanic won all those awards,
and he wanted to talk to me about a clothing line he was thinking
about starting up. I was always up for a road trip and an unexpected
good time, and I was happy to share some of my insights about the
fashion industry. At that time, no artist had been successful starting up
his own clothing line, and I told Puffy I didnt think it was a good idea.
Wasnt because I didnt want to see him as a competitor, but because I
didnt want him to lose his shirt. He was a friend of mine. My thinking

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was, Theres plenty of business to go around. And my experience was,

Its a tough market, and the kids have some kind of radar that tells
them these rappers dont have the first idea about clothes or fashion
or whatever. A lot of artists had put their name on some upstart lines,
and nobody seemed to care. The thinking among some of these
starch-white fashion companies was to take a black guy with a bald
head, put him in their clothes, stamp their logo in his hand, and hope
theres some cache by association among the teens and tweens and
Generation Y-types who follow this type of thing. But like I said, con-
sumers today are smarter than ever before. They know when theyre
being jerked around, so they stayed away each time out.
But Puffy said, Dont worry, D, Im an artist. Im fashionable. I
was fashionable before I became successful.
I couldnt argue with him on this. There were a few of us on his
private jet, and we got the party started at altitude, so we didnt just
talk about Puffys clothing line. In fact, we hardly talked about it at all,
just touched on it every here and there. When we landed in L.A., we
went straight to the Academy Awards ceremony, and then on to a
bunch of Oscar night parties, which for me was like a slap in the face.
I mean, this was 1998, and FUBU had been popping for a couple years;
I was fairly well known, but I got out to Los Angeles, and I was at a
party with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clint
Eastwood, and I just felt ridiculous. They might as well have given me
a tray with some drinks on it, because I was nobody in this crowd.
Nobody, somebody . . . it didnt matter. We went at it hard, all
night long. It was me, Puffy, J. Lo, Andre Harrell, Heavy D and my
partner Keith. We finally shut it down at about eight in the morning,
which on our east coast clock was even later (or, earlier, if you want
to look at it that way). I put my head down for a second and started
to nod off when Puffy called me and said, D, lets get ready, weve
got to be on the jet at ten.
I thought, What the hell is this guy made of? Really, I was twisted.

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Wed been up all night, partying hard, after flying out the day before.
We went to the Oscars, and then to all these private Oscar parties, and
now we had to hustle on over to the airport. Then we got on the plane
and talked for about two hours. Then Puffy laid down in the middle of
the floor of the jet, folded his arms across his chest and closed his
eyes. He zoned everything out. I sat and fidgeted in my seat, trying to
get comfortable, and every once in a while Id catch Puffy out of the
corner of my eye, laying like a dead man on the floor of the cabin, with-
out a care in the world. He slept that way for about two hours.
Id assumed we were going back to New York, because nobody
had indicated otherwise, but about four hours after taking off from
L.A. it became clear we were headed to Boston, where Puffy had a
show to do. Puffy certainly hadnt let on by his behavior the night
before that he had a concert. I might have known. It was the middle
of his world tour. We got to Boston, and there was a police escort to
meet us at the airport and lead us to the arena. We didnt stop at a
hotel to freshen up, didnt stop to get something to eat, just went
directly to the stage. Puffy changed on the way over. The place was
packed, and people were just going crazy, and he put on a serious,
relentless show for the next three hours. His energy level was off the
hook, then right after that we were whisked off to some after-party,
where he had to do a little meet and greet thing for a couple hours,
then after that we went to a recording studio where hed booked
some time to lay down some new tracks. And all during this time, he
was on the phone every five minutes, giving interviews, making
deals and handling the artists at his record label.
Im exhausted just writing about this now, all these years later,
but Puffy was like a wind-up toy. He just kept going and going, and
at the other end I understood what he means when he says, We
wont stop! Thats one of his lines. The guy must have slept maybe
two hours in the previous three daysand those were on the floor of
the plane! Me, I thought I was gonna die. I was dead, and this guy

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puts on an incredible show, and then when its over hes still not
done. He bounces up and keeps going. And thats business-as-usual
for him. One year, on top of everything else, he even found time to
train for the New York Marathon, which I thought was just sick.
Incredible, but sick.
Discipline, thats the key. A guy like Puffy, he sees something he
wants, and he goes after it hard. Doesnt matter if its in his personal
life, or his professional life, or if its over some start-up enterprise that
seeks to combine the two. Hes just one of those relentless, tireless
individuals, and its an inspiring thing to see. Time magazine, in nam-
ing him one of the most influential people in the world, described
Puffy as a force of nature, but its not natural, the energy this man
has, the focus, the determination. Its something else entirely.
The outcome on Puffys clothing line was he wanted me to dis-
tribute it. At the time, I wasnt ready to take on a whole other line, so
I suggested he get in touch with a friend of mine named Jeff Tweedy,
who had some experience in this area, and thats how it played out.
Jeff ended up heading Sean John for the next six years, and helped
to make it a major force in mens fashion. When they launched, Sean
John was our only serious competitor. They took a big bite out of us,
but it was bound to happen that some other line would emerge and
give us a run. There was Puffys Sean John, and soon after that there
was Jay-Zs RocaWear, two artist-based lines that worked in a big
way because the artists who were out in front of them were known
as fashionable trendsetters. These guys had style.
I share this story because everyone thinks rappers are a bunch of
hard-charging party animals, up all night, drinking champagne, what-
ever, and thats often the case. Thats how it was with Puffy, too,
back in the day, but he was also disciplined and focused and profes-
sional. He was calm in the middle of chaos. He set goals for himself
and he went after them. And let me tell you, it was something to see.

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 Outro

CLOUT

I think back to that opening scene at the start

of this book, the one with my face down on the lawn of my girlfriends
house on Long Island, a gun to the back of my head, my life flashing
in front of my eyes, me thinking I was about to die, and I recognize
that my story is all about power. But then, everyones story is about
power, one way or another. What sets us apart is how we play it.
At just that moment on my girlfriends lawn, the guy with the gun
was in control, but I realize now he didnt have any real power over
me. Yeah, he could have put a bullet in my head and taken my life and
my car, but thats not any kind of power. Anyway, thats not real
power. Thats not the kind of power people write books about. That
was a display of cowardice more than anything else, a bullying tactic
carried out by some low-life with a weapon who would never know
what it meant to be truly in charge, to harness his God-given strengths
and overcome his inevitable weaknesses and lift himself up and out
and beyond his circumstance.
I believe strongly that were all born with the power to survive

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DISPLAY OF POWER

and thrive in this world, its just that some of us havent figured out
how to tap into it. If Ive got any kind of message, this is it right here.
That guy with the gun, he wouldnt have had the first idea how to use
his abilities in any kind of positive way because thats not where his
head was at. That little old lady on the strip in Vegas, soft-pedaling
the same car as the leadfoot kid in front of her, she couldnt think to
look under the hood to discover the power within. Hell, it didnt even
occur to her that she needed that power. But weve all got the same
engine. Weve all got the same parts, the same shot at success, or
greatness, or accomplishment . . . or whatever it is were shooting
for, and so its the display of that power that separates the haves of
this world from the have-not s. Its the ability to change the way we
look out at the world, and the way the world looks back at us. Its
identifying that power, and figuring what the hell to do with it. Its
knowing to look for it in the first place.
So, yeah, my story is all about power. The FUBU story is all about
power. The rise to influence of our hip-hop culture, all about power.
When you roll it all up in one big bundle, its also about decisiveness,
agility, dedication, communication, purpose, leadership. Its about the
vision to zig when everyone else zags, to see ten steps ahead of you,
to react to the fallout before it finds you. Its about surrounding your-
self with good people, and finding the best in those people. Its about
refusing to give up or take no for an answer. Its about knowing when
and how to play your position in the jungle, be it lion or hyena.
Ive tried in these pages to be honest and objective about my role
in FUBUs launch, and FUBUs place in the hip-hop culture and the
culture at large. But everything thats gone down in my lifefor us,
by ushas come from strength. Power. It comes from the power of
my mother, setting all those positive examples. It comes from the
power of seeing my boys from the neighborhood heading down all
kinds of wrong roads, and knowing there had to be a better path. For
me. Im not saying theres one path were all meant to follow, but I

214
 clout

sure as hell didnt want to wind up dead, or in jail, or stuck in some

dead-end job helping someone else pursue his dreams. It comes from
the power of getting with strong individuals like my original partners,
Keith Perrin, J Alexander and Carl Brown, who recognized an opportu-
nity and were willing to put everything they had into it. It comes from
the power of my new partners, Bruce and Norman Weisfeld, who had
the courage and power to reach out to four young black guys from the
hood and trust them to grow their business. It comes from the power
of our corporate distributors at Samsung, who had the strength of vision
to buy into our vision, our employees at FUBU who helped us to realize
that vision, and our core customers, who bought into our line in such a
big, determined way we had no choice but to succeed. And it comes
from the power of a corporate culture that seems to want to make room
for the African-American community in its business plan, even as their
traditional models suggest we dont spend money in any kind of
meaningful way.
So you see, theres power at every turn. The power could be
internal. For example, it wasnt the easiest thing in the world for me
to cop to, me wanting to be a designer. I mean, when I was a kid,
where I grew up, designers were typically gay, flamboyant and white.
For a young black male heterosexual from Hollis to put it out that I
wanted to sew hats for a living, and after that to make it as a fashion
designer . . . that was tough. I was just begging to be a punching bag
around my neighborhood. It took a certain fortitude, I dont mind say-
ing. But I knew who I was and what I wanted, and no amount of peer
pressure could have stopped me from pursuing my goal.
Mostly, though, the power is all around. Its under my hood, its
under my partners hoods, its under my competitors hoods, its
under your hood, and its under the hood of the guy in the car next to
you at the stop light. Like I said, weve all got the same engines. Even
that low-life who jacked my car all those years ago. Matter of fact,
theres a footnote to that Rockville Center hold-up, and its worth

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DISPLAY OF POWER

repeating here for the way it shows how power can turn. After this
guy made off with my car, after my head cleared a little bit, I tried to
puzzle things together, and I had my suspicions about who was
involved. I figured it out that there was some guy I knew, some guy
who spotted me in that gas station, who then sent one of his boys to
follow me and jack my car. He didnt mean me any physical harm,
despite the gun to the back of my head and the throwing me to the
ground. He just wanted the car, and whatever cash he could take,
because he knew the car was probably insured and the money was
probably meaningless to me. It was the way of the street. But he also
knew that he couldnt do it himself, because it would come back to
bite him, so he sent someone from another one of his crews, one of
his stoolies, someone I wouldnt recognize.
And guess what? This guy from the gas station continued to run
with the same crowd, the same group of people I used to know from
when we were flipping those cars. After a while, he started to talk. I
dont know if he was bragging about what he and his boy did to me
that night, or if he was looking for some kind of absolution, but he
kept running his mouth. He even went to my boy Hype Williams sev-
eral years later and told him the whole story, and I think Hype must
have encouraged him to talk to me because not long after that I got
a call from this guy. Hed been in prison. Hed been in and out of all
kinds of trouble. Nothing had gone right for this guy, and there he
was on the other end of my phone, spinning his story. He said, D,
my life aint right. Its never been right since then.
I said, So why you on the phone with me? You think Ive put
some curse on you?
The guy was kind of fumbling on the other end of the phone, like
he didnt know what to say, so I kept talking. I dont have a beef
with you, I said. Whats past is past. I have kids. Im happy with my
life. You still have that street mentality, but Ive moved on.
He said, So we cool? We straight?

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 clout

Soon as he said it I thought, Its a funny thing, power. One

moment this guys got it behind the prop of a gun. His stoolie was in
control, so he was in control by extension, but then the next moment
it bounces back to me. Might have taken a couple years for that next
moment to roll around, but it always rolls around, and when it finally
did the power had shifted. Big time. To where this guy was desper-
ate and pathetic and pretty much begging me to let him off the hook
for what hed done. And I did. I cut him loose, told him we were
straight. And I guess we were, because I realized, This guy cant
touch me. Truth was, I hadnt thought about this guy in years. He was
nothing to me. Hadnt thought about that hold-up in Rockville Center,
either. Its like I forgot it had ever happened. But I was thinking about
it now that he had called. Put my head right back in that moment.
And I realized, this low-life could get one of his boys to stick a gun to
the back of my head, but I would always have the upper hand
because I knew how to tap that engine I had racing under my hood.
I knew to look for that power within, and I knew how to put it to use.
We might have started out at the same place, but Id stepped on the
gas and passed this guy by a long time ago.

217
 Acknowledgments

HELP

THROUGHOUT MY LIFE, I HAVE MET THE FULL GAMUT OF BILLIONAIRES,

MURDERERS, ACTIVISTS, ICONS, DEVILS, ANGELS, LEADERS, FOLLOWERS,
PRIESTS AND PIMPS. THEY ALL HAD ONE THING IN COMMONSOMETHING
THEY HAD, SOMETHING THEY LOST, OR SOMETHING THEY WANTED. AND
THAT SOMETHING WAS POWER. IVE TRIED TO TAKE THAT AWAY FROM EACH
ENCOUNTER, EVEN WHEN THINGS DIDNT GO MY WAY, BECAUSE IF IVE
LEARNED ONE THING IN THIS LIFE ITS THIS: EVEN IF YOU LOSE, DONT LOSE
THE LESSON.
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I HAVE LEARNED A LOT OF LESSONS. I ONLY EXIST
BECAUSE OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR ME TO
WALK IN MOST DOORS AND KICK IN SOME OTHERS, FROM MARTIN LUTHER
KING, MALCOLM X, MUHAMMAD ALI, RICHARD PRYOR AND NAT KING COLE, TO
ALL THE ENTREPRENEURS, ARTISTS AND EVERYDAY PEOPLE WHO HAVE
INSPIRED ME. I HAVE A FULL UNDERSTANDING THAT I STAND ON THE SHOUL-
DERS OF GIANTS, AND I REALIZE I WOULD NOT BE IN A POSITION TO SHARE MY
EXPERIENCES INTHIS BOOK WERE IT NOT FOR THE COUNTLESS OTHERS WHO
HAVE GONE BEFORE ME.

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AND SO TO THESE FINAL NOTES . . . I CANT PLAY AN INSTRUMENT AND I

CAN BARELY HOLD A NOTE IN THE BATHTUB, SO THESE WORDS WILL BE THE
CLOSEST ILL GET TO WRITING THE THANK YOU MESSAGES YOU SEE ON THE
BACKS OF ALBUM COVERS. I LOVE TO READ THOSE LINER NOTES, AND I SHARE
MY OWN VERSION HERE. THIS IS A NOD TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE
PLAYED A ROLE IN MY LIFE, PEOPLE WHO HAVE HELPED ME OR INFLUENCED
ME OR CHALLENGED ME TO DO BETTER. THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE I MIGHT
HAVE LEFT OFF OF THESE SHOUT-OUTS . . . PLEASE FORGIVE ME . . . IM SURE
YOU WILL TELL ME ABOUT IT . . . HERE GOES . . .

THIS IS TO CARL, KEITH AND J . . . THANK YOU FOR THE BROTHERHOOD

THIS IS TO MY GRANDMOTHER, VIOLA COPPEDGE, AND MY GRANDFATHER,

ARTHUR COPPEDGE . . . I KNOW THEYRE BOTH SMILING DOWN ON ME
WITH PRIDE

THIS IS TO THE WEISFELD FAMILY . . . THANK YOU FOR THE TRUST.

THIS IS TO LESLIE SHORT . . . YOU ARE THE BEST AND HAVE ALWAYS HAD MY
BACK. JOE LEVIN . . . SELL SELL SELL. GRIM . . . THERE COULD NEVER BE
ENOUGH THANKS FOR GUARDING MY LIFE. FIX YA FACE. MAL . . . YA FRIED
BUT I LOVE YA. THE DRIVER . . . THEY LOVE ME FOR YOU. SIMONE . . . YOU ARE
THE GREATEST. OLEG. PIVEN. STUFFY! LARRY BLENDEN . . . SHARP AS A RAZOR
AND BALLS OF STEEL. JARED . . . SMART, YOUNG AND GOOD-LOOKING! DONT
GET GASSED. KYLIE . . . YOU ARE THE SMARTEST PERSON I KNOW. TUTT . . .
ALL THE WAY FROM RED LOBSTER, BABY! WHAT! OMAR RODRIGUEZ . . . MY
MAN. TREVOR CLARK . . . MY WINGMAN. CHAMP . . . THE VOICE OF REASON.
BLACKERRR AND BIG PAT, THE FUBU RYDERS. BOBBY JOSEPH . . . THE
HOTTEST DESIGNER IN THE GAME, HANDS DOWN. BARRY BLUE . . . IF I WASNT
ME, ID WANT TO BE YOU. COPEN . . . A GENIUS AND MY FRIEND. RAJ . . . PLS
SHIP ON TIME. DAVID HOROWITZ. EDNA. CORENA, MAYBELL AND CHRIS . . . MY
PICKERS. ALI. RACHAEL. BLESS BERNARDO . . . HER NAME SAYS IT ALL. ERMY.

219
DISPLAY OF POWER

VAL. KIKI PETERSON . . . YOU WERE ALWAYS THERE FOR ME, THANKS. TIE.
PRIMO. TYSON . . . SPRINKLING THE STONES. BIG KEITH . . . LV. MIMI. GORILLA
FORCE. JOE AND RALPH NAKASH. EDDIE FROM JORDACHE. JULIAN FROM
FRANCE. BABBS FROM GERMANY. SUKI LEE . . . THANK YOU FOR THE MANY
YEARS OF SUPPORT. TONY LACANTE . . . A GREAT BUSINESS MAN. RONNIE AND
PEERLESS. LARU. STEVE ARNOLD. DANNY AND RADU . . . THANKS FOR COMING
AND HELPING US STEP UP OUR GAME. CHARLIE. MR. CHO . . . YOU ARE THE MAN.
THERESA . . . YOU CONTROL THE MONEY, SO I GUESS I SHOULD CALL YOU THE
BOSS. IM GRATEFUL THAT YOURE ON MY SIDE.

KEITH CLINKSCALE . . . THE MEANING OF CLASS. RAY AND LOUIS FROM BET . . .
STRONG ,SMART AND BLACK. MARTY FROM BET. SANDRA STERN . . . THE
MEANING OF COOL. LARRY MILLER . . . THE BRAINS OF BRAND JORDAN.
BERNIE YUMAN . . . SAY, SAY, SAY. PLS SHOW ME MORE POWER! BOX AL HAS-
SAS AND RIZA IZAD . . . THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING IN ME TO GET THIS BOOK
DONE. COWBOY, MJ LATIMER, KEDAR. LL . . . IM STILL YA BIGGEST FAN,
HOMIE! DARRYL MILLER . . . BRILLIANT LEGAL MIND. JAMES D . . . IM WAIT-
ING ON YOU PIMPIN. HYPE WILLIAMS . . . THE MAD SCIENTIST. CHRIS
ROBINSON, JESSY TERRERO, DR. TEETH, ERICK WHITE, OMARI, PONCH, DER-
RICK, MALIKE . . . THE GENIUSES. BARRY GORDON AT IMAGE. CHARLES
KLEIN, BILL COX, RICH WAGER AND FAMILY. LOU, HARD EARN, CONRAD
QUARLES, MACHO, GENE NUSBAUM AND FAMILY. CHRISTIAN BIKOWSKI.
CURT, ROBERT KIM, DEBRA GRABIAN. JOANNA . . . YOU ARE THE BEST.
THANKS FOR BEING ON MY SIDE. IO, FILIP ICON ENT. PHIL MACK, DRE THE
EDITOR, NOMI, HEATHER, RONNIE THE JEWELER, BIG MIKE, SNAGS.
RICHARD PILSON. STEVE AND DEBBIE, BILL STEPHANIE AND MOM . . .
THANKS FOR TAKING CARE OF MY BABIES. BIG TIM IN THE HOUSE! GENE
RIGGINS, BURNT PHAT FARM, WAYNE, FLA. ED WOODS, LONDEL, JAMES.
TONY RASHAAN. BIG SHORTY, JEROME, KATE SOUTHERLAND, CHAKA AND
JEFF, LYNN BERNETT, KENARD GIBBS, MARVETT BRITTO . . . KEEP KILLIN
EM, GIRL. RON GUTTA, JIMMY HENCHMAN, AL MONDAY . . . SEE YA SOON.
CAT, RA RIGHT RIGHTS. BOB, ANDREA AND GARY . . . YOU GUYS HELPED ME

220
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FROM DAY ONE. BERNARD CAHN . . . R.I.P. HENRY COPPEDGE . . . THANKS,

UNC. R.I.P. ANTONIO, CLUB BED. HERMAN FROM DUB MAGAZINE . . . LETS
GET THIS MONEY. REY . . . YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE MY BACK AND I LOVE YOU
FOR IT. MIKE DYSON . . . ENLIGHTEN ME, BABY. REECE AND DAYMOND . . .
GEORGE FRAZER SPEAK TO EM. SMAC ENT. TOMMY POOCH, GEORGE AND
REGINA DANIALS . . . POPS! HOW DO YOU DO IT! R KELLY. REV. FLOYD FLAKE
. . . THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AND DYNAMIC SPEAKER I HAVE EVER HAD THE
HONOR OF MEETING. THANK YOU FOR ALL THE ADVICE! LORI TROTTER . . .
THANK YOU FOR ALWAYS BEING THERE FOR ME.

DAN PAISNER . . . YOU MADE THIS BOOK EASY. YOU ALSO TAUGHT ME SOME
VERY VALUABLE THINGS ABOUT MYSELF. YOU WERE DAMN NEAR MY SHRINK.
THANK YOU.

DAN STRONE OF TRIDENT MEDIA GROUP . . . YOU GOT THIS DEAL GOING.

REBEKAH AND STAFF AT NAKED INK . . . GREAT PEOPLE, FOCUSED PEOPLE AND
PROFESSIONALS. LETS HAVE FUN WITH THIS!

TO ALL THE CONSUMERS WHO HAVE SUPPORTED ME FOR YEARS . . . YOU

SPENT YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEY ON MY DESIGNS, IDEAS AND DREAMS
AND THEN WORE THEM ON YOUR BODIES AND DRESSED THE ONES YOU LOVE
IN THEM. THATS HUGE. THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING.

LINX, TIGGA, JASON, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, JESSE JACKSON, IRV GOTTI, CHRIS
GOTTI . . . NOW THAT YA BACK, DONT HURT EM TOO HARD! MARK WAHLBERG
AND JAMAL. JA RULE . . . HIT ME WITH THE HEAT, HOMIE. PUFFY, MARY J. BLIGE
AND KENDU . . . CLASS ACTS. DJ IREA . . . YOU ARE INCREDIBLE. BEING YOUR
MANAGER IS AN HONOR! WYCLEFF AND BEAST, LENOX LEWIS THE UNDIS-
PUTED, PRINCE THE ARTIST . . . THANKS FOR MAKING MY DREAMS COME
TRUE. MONTEL WILLIAMS . . . LETS HIT THE SLOPES, BABY! CHRIS BROWN
AND FAMILY. LUDACRIS . . . ONE OF THE SLICKEST LYRICISTS IN THE GAME.

221
DISPLAY OF POWER

MRS. JONES . . . YOU GAVE ME ONE OF MY FIRST BREAKS. BRAND NUBIAN,

JERMAINE DUPRI . . . YOU INSPIRE ME, HOMIE. BUSTA . . . STOP CALLING ME
FAT WHEN YOU SEE ME.

RECE AND LITTLE DAYMOND . . . MICHAEL MADD . . . CHRIS LIGHTY AND MONA
SCOTT . . . PIMPING THE GAME FOR YEARS. I LOVE IT. BUN B, PIMP C, AND RED
. . . THREE MEN OF HONOR. SLIM THUG AND FAMILY . . . REAL PEOPLE. ERICK
NICKS . . . A&R ROYALTY. FABULOUS CHAO AND CAMP . . . LETS GET IT. KELLY
G AND STEVEN HILL . . . THE GATEKEEPERS, STYLISTS WHO HAVE KEPT US
HOT FOREVER. JUNE AMBROS . . . KNOCK EM DEAD WITH THE BOOK, BABY.
TERRELL, ROGER, MONICA, MIA AND MANY, MANY MORE.

RUSSEL SIMMONS . . . EVERYBODYS SILENT PARTNER AND ONE OF THE FIRST

MEN I EVER WITNESSED AS A YOUNG BOY IN HOLLIS DOING IT BIG AND SHOW-
ING ME THERE WERE OTHER ROUTES TO SUCCESS.

STEVEN COLVIN . . . MAXIM IS STILL THE SEXIEST BOOK OUT. DON FRANCA-
CHINI . . . FOR YOU TO CALL ME THE CALVIN KLEIN OF OUR GENERATION WAS
THE BIGGEST HONOR OF ALL. DENISE RICH . . . THE ESSENCE PARTY WAS A
BLAST, THANK YOU. DAVID WINTERS . . . IM READY WHEN YOU ARE. PETER
ARNELL . . . YOU AND BERNIE EQUAL POWER. HERMAN DUB MAGAZINE . . .
LETS GET FOCUSED, BABY. CAROLYN BYRD . . . TO BE ANYWHERE NEAR YOUR
LEVEL IS A DREAM. DENNIS PUBLISHING . . . YOU SECRETLY OWN THE MAR-
KET. MARK ECKO AND SETH . . . SHOW EM HOW TO DO IT.

PATTY WEBSTER . . . BELYA DINA . . . BETH AND LYNE BURNET FROM VIBE . . .
EGYPT . . . STEVE HARVEY . . . TALENT . . . GEORGE FRAPHER, MICHAEL DYSON
. . . MIKE JOHN OF URBAN WIRELESS . . . DAYE MAYS . . . STAR AND BUCK WILD
. . . CHAD . . . SARAH RAINMAKER . . . BELVIANNA TODMANN.

TRAV AND RICHIE . . . ITS ABOUT TO POP! WILLIE ESCO, DJ CLUE, D NICE
MOGUL, SPACE BABY, S&S, KID CAPRI, BIZZ, LS1, MAURICIO, KHALID, FRANKIE

222
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NEEDLES, GEORGE DUKES, CHRIS AND ROMAN JONES . . . YOU HAVE THE
HOTTEST CLUBS IN THE COUNTRY AND ITS ONLY CAUSE YOU CATS ARE HOT!
KEEP DOING YA THINGS. PIMPS BENNY BOOM, WEKEEM, RUFF RYDERS,
SHAKA AND QUEEN LATIFAH, SHERYL LEE RALPH, ZABB JUDAH, FLOYD MAY-
WEATHER, LORENZ TATE, WINKIE WRIGHT, ED LOVE, RICK ROSS, E CLASS, STAR
AND BUCK WILD . . . IM WAITING TO HEAR YOU BACK OUT THERE, BABY. MAGIC
JOHNSON . . . THE BEST. SPIKE LEE . . . THANKS FOR THE PRIVATE JET RIDES TO
THE GAMES. BILL SPECTOR, TYSON BECKFORD, PATTY LABELLE, PHARELL AND
ROB, SCOTT STORCH AND DERRICK, STEVE STOUT . . . YOU TRICKED THEM AT
THEIR OWN GAME AND I LOVE IT. TAVIS SMILEY, JOHN SINGLETON, TYREES
AND DUQUAN. JAMIE FOSTER BROWN . . . GREAT LADY. URBAN WORLD WIRE-
LESS, MIKE JOHN, DATWON, INDUSTRY INSIDER, FEDS ANTONIO, DON DIVA
VIBE. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

223
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